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going to get a lot better. But you impatient fellows are going to cause a lot of grief.” He was the first one to predict the backlash. He said, “Don't send your northern people down here. We feel we know how to handle this problem. There are a lot of decent and intelligent people in the South and they are beginning to emerge. You've got the same kind of colored folk up here than we have down there, but we happen to have more of them.”

He was never a member of the Klu Klux Klan for instance?

Oh, heavens no. Bill was a liberal Mississippian, though some may call that a contradiction in terms.

I know what you mean.

Remember that Faulkner came from the heart of rural Mississippi. Oxford's in the very middle of the backwood part of Mississippi.

He kept asking me to come down and I kept postponing it. I wasn't very anxious to go to Oxford. The first time that I went was for the funeral. I was heartbroken about this. On the second of July, 1962, early in the morning, The New York Times called me up to tell me Faulkner had died. I was on a plane within two hours. I went down with Donald Klopfer, my partner, and novelist Bill Styron. Life Magazine had called Bill Styron up immediately and asked him if he