Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back John T. Matthews American Literary History, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2004, pp. 238-262 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/54817 [ Access provided at 11 Jan 2021 15:04 GMT from Boston University Libraries ] ajh017.fm Page 238 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:15 AM Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back John T. Matthews In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Thomas Sutpen relates how, as the overseer of a sugar plantation in Haiti, he put down a rebellion at the outset of his career as a new-world planter. He explains that at grst he did not register his danger; a US Southerner in the West Indies, Sutpen failed to “know, comprehend, what he must have been seeing every day because of [his] innocence” (203). As Sutpen never looks more deeply into the circumstances of his original insult at the door of Pettibone’s Tidewater Virginia mansion, so he shows little interest in understanding the place where he set out to make his fortune. In going to sea, the 14-year-old Sutpen acted solely on his teacher’s assertion that the West Indies were where “poor men went in ships and became rich” (195). He knew nothing about where the West Indies were, how he would get there, or what he would do there—only that he would make money—“it didn’t matter how” (195). Sutpen launches his design with that obliviousness that is When a voodoo warning American innocence.