Lexington is another of Faulkner’s “little postage-stamps,” a microcosm of humanity which just happens to be in Mississippi. The time of the title was the mid 1950s when Jim Crow oppressed everyone, putting the trash on top of all, black and white. The blacks suffered the visible injustice, the whites got theirs behind the scenes, until one night, one young black fellow had enough and gunned down six white men, three to death.
How he managed to elude capture and courts (though he suffered incarceration) and Mississippi’s then-traveling electric chair, is a saga worthy of myth. Oxford, MS corporate lawyer Allie Povall, a Lexington native who was twelve at the time, makes the most of it. Almost too much, with his atmospherics, making the clouds, the rain and wind stand-in for what another age would have expressed as divine judgement. His conclusions about why Eddie Noel not only was not executed for premeditated murder but lived into old age a free man, i.e. that blood will tell and prominent white blood could get even a black man off, isn’t very creditable. But it’s certainly worth considering.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 