For my final paper, I would like to explore the concept of speaking calumny into existence through the use of the “one drop” rule regarding Black ancestry.

Speaking aloud the perception that someone could be Black becomes a fact [they must be Black because it was a thought and so they are] which then becomes that character’s doom. In the case of Joe Christmas [LIA] and Charles Bon [AA], their fates are doomed when someone whispers “black blood.” Joe Christmas’s ancestral lineage remained a mystery throughout most of his life and yet, when someone whispered or shouted about Joe’s potential black blood, Joe was a pariah and was either removed or he fled to a new unknown. In AA, Sutpen confronts the arrival of Charles Bon at his Hundred by revealing to his son Henry Bon’s paternal lineage – Sutpen was his father [from a previous marriage which, Sutpen walked out on upon discovering that his wife also had negro blood] and thus, Charles was unfit to be betrothed to Judith -their – sister. Potential incest, though jarring, had a solution – keep the lovers apart. However, when Sutpen later reveals that Bon has black blood, the disgust and betrayal proves too much for Henry, who kills Bon right in front of his sister-bride at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred.

There is great but damning power in revealing if someone has “black blood,” however, there were times in Joe Christmas’s life in which he took that damning power and made it his whenever he chose to reveal that possibility about his lineage. He would use it as a taunt, such as when he taunted his adopted father with the possibility that he [McEachern] had raised, clothed, and fed a negro. To the people, such as McEachern who were suddenly faced with the calumnity of association to “black blood,” it would mean to be tainted.