Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses.

Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. By Thadious M. Davis. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 339. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-3139-X; cloth, $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-3103-9.)

Best known for her 1994 biography of Nella Larsen, which ushered the neglected Harlem Renaissance novelist into the literary canon, Thadious M. Davis undertakes a very different project in her latest book. With Games of Property, Davis offers a re-reading of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses that succeeds in her hope of beginning "a fresh dialogue about Faulkner's critique of power" (p. 18). Drawing on the interdisciplinary methodology of critical race theory and on extensive legal research, Davis examines in Games of Property the historical position of slaves as persons and property, an epistemological impossibility that southern courts attempted to naturalize for nearly a century.

In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner explores his most profound theme, the destructive legacy of slavery for both southern blacks and whites. His modernist novel is a collection of five short stories and two longer stories that taken together tell the history of Carothers McCaslin, the white founder of a Yoknapatawpha County plantation, and of several generations of McCaslin's descendants, both white and black, free and slave. "'Was," Faulkner's first story in Go Down, Moses, is for Davis the key text in the larger novel. Though the black male slave named Tomey's Turl speaks only a sentence or two in "Was," Davis makes a persuasive case that Tuff can be read as a game player whose looping evasion of his brother/owner/hunter Buck McCaslin "articulates a narrative by means of motion and action" (p. 120). Davis maintains that games and game playing in Go Down. Moses "clear a neutral space" in which the laws of society are suspended and that Turl transcends stereotype when he is understood as a self-conscious game player (p. 46).

In Games of Property, Davis re-imagines Go Down, Moses with Turl at the center. Her strategy is not without risk: though references to him occur in two of Faulkner's other stories in the novel ("The Bear" and "Delta Autumn"), Turl only appears in "Was." As a result, Davis is unable to give each of the stories in the novel equal emphasis ("Pantaloon in Black" and "The Old People" suffer the most neglect). Davis understands the necessity of making such a sacrifice. "[A]s a potential structure for empowering black racial discourse," she writes, "'conventional southern literary discourse is a dead end, because its primary project, across time and space, class and gender, has been a naturalizing of whiteness and a consolidation of a racial hegemony ..." (p. 256). Repositioning Turl from the distant margins of Go Down, Moses to its center, Davis reveals the black self-interest and agency in Faulkner's novel, and she demonstrates that the novel is as much the property of black readers as it is of white readers, is as open to a "black" reading as to a "white" one.

None of the female McCaslin slaves in Go Down, Moses have even Turl's limited mobility. As a result, Eunice, Turl's grandmother, drowns herself--an act so desperate that it is inconceivable to the white McCaslin men--and the silence in the novel of Tomasina, Turl's mother, becomes deafening. Davis is a powerful feminist critic, and her treatment of the objectification suffered by Eunice and Tomasina leaves one to wonder what shape Games of Property might have taken had she chosen to re-imagine Faulkner's novel with a female slave's experience at the center.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Faulkner remains the immovable object that the best African American scholars keep running up against. With Games of Property, Davis skillfully loops around the (white male) American modernist "master" as a means of subversion. Davis's theoretically informed literary analysis is conducted at the highest level being produced at this cultural moment. Like Faulkner's novel, Games of Property is a political document, the product of a complex culture that reflects the contradictory forces at work--and play--in that culture.

Anne Arundel Community College 

STEVEN B. CANADAY