Alabama Faulkner

…where I go on & on about little bits of Faulkner’s life…

Late last month, I mentioned William Faulkner’s daughter, Alabama, who is not often spoken of (granted, she was born premature and lived only a few days).

Alabama was born shortly after Faulkner and Estelle moved into Rowan Oak. Born January 11, 1931, she came two months before her due date and died nine days later; her doctor indicated on the death certificate that he had attended her from the date of her birth and last saw her alive on the 20th, with “prematurity” being the principal cause of death. This was Dr. J.C. Culley, and Estelle had the baby at his hospital on Van Buren Avenue there in Oxford.

Being as little as she was and Dr Culley’s hospital being without an incubator, Faulkner decided to bring Estelle and Alabama home as he figured that he and Mammy Callie would be just as good in providing the care she needed.

Now the story gets really interesting! I mentioned before that Faulkner was on his way to Memphis to bring home an incubator. In that version, his brother Dean is with him and the baby dies at home while they’re on this trip. This is the version most all of us know and believe to be true.

In another version, the baby dies in the bed next to William Faulkner. Estelle was too unwell to help much and Faulkner was grief-stricken and enraged with the lack of help from the doctor in getting Alabama healthy. Faulkner gets up, goes up 11th Street to the Culley residence, and shoots the doctor in the shoulder. It would have been a ten minute walk. No doubt, Faulkner would have just cut through his backyard and been there even quicker.

Yet another version has Faulkner shooting the doctor through the screen door at Rowan Oak. A small handful of other stories still float around. No matter what, the doctor was well enough on the 20th to sign Alabama’s death certificate:

The death certificate lists the 20th as her burial date also, and it’s said that her father rode in the car to the cemetery with her little casket in his lap. She’s buried in the larger Faulkner section; William and Estelle are buried in the newer section.

Little Alabama’s place is there on the right-hand side of the tall center monument, that closest little oval with the broken vase. This pic is from a visit I made in 2018.

Y’all know I love little connections. The family who owns Neilson’s on the Oxford Square — the oldest store in the South as it’s been in business since 1839 — lives at the 1857 Greek Revival known formerly as Shadowlawn, the Neilson-Culley-Lewis house. The house sounds incredible. It was built by the founder of Neilson’s, purchased by Dr Culley, and now it’s back in the Neilson’s department store family. During the war, it was occupied by Union troops. Stark Young wrote about the story of a Union soldier shooting dead a black child who has been climbing a cedar tree there in his ‘So Red the Rose’ — and the home is most likely the model for the setting of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”

Neilson’s on the Square 

As to (possibly) why the house survived the war, from Memphis Magazine:

“I possess a friend here in Nancy Thompson, a most spirited young miss of sixteen. In her home some of Grant’s men ordered her to play ‘Yankee Doodle’ and she scorned to comply, so they tore up an Aeolian harp and a piano. I was there at the first when Grant’s troops startled the town by pouring in in large numbers. Their first target was a little negro boy who was perched in a big apple tree at the Neilson place. The Neilsons say he dropped to the ground like an apple falling. And Quit Wilkins . . . standing at a woodpile watching them pass, was shot in the leg and will be a cripple for life; he is fifteen. There is a good deal of smashing, but I tell my Oxford friend just to wait, we shall have worse later on . . . .”

The diary also reveals why the Neilson house was spared the torch while many others were burned to the ground. “It was written in Mrs. Neilson’s diary that the Kansas Jayhawkers [who were anti-slavery and pro-Union] set up camp in this yard,” says Patty. “We think this is why the house, and thus the diaries, were saved.”

Estelle was from a comfortable upbringing (btw, Faulkner invited her people, the Oldhams, into his home but would not visit them in theirs because they and in particular her father had been so ugly about him being a writer and not set to make a good living) and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle with her first husband, Judge Cornell Franklin.

Franklin was a territorial judge in Hawaii when their daughter Victoria was born, then he was in private practice in Shanghai when Estelle gave birth to son Malcolm there. Though they eventually amicably divorced, Judge Franklin mostly stayed in Shangai until the communist party granted him a visa in 1951. That’s because in WWII, Japan had him interned from 1941-1942 and then he spent a year or two in New York before heading back to China.

It really was a “good” divorce between Estelle and the Judge; she has fond memories of keeping up the relationship between their children and his family in Columbus. They’d take the train back and forth between there and Oxford, and when that got old, Faulkner would drive them. The Judge’s mother approved of Faulkner and the idea of Estelle marrying him. She even “lent” a cook for them on their beach honeymoon, a ramshackle Pascagoula house gifted for a while for the occasion from one of his friends, and the kids even came along. The wedding had been June 12, 1929 at the 1844 College Hill Presbyterian there around Oxford. BTW, the sanctuary there was destroyed by fire in 2022 but the congregation still meets.

In a terrible circumstance, Judge Franklin and his second wife also lost a baby in 1931 just as Estelle and William Faulkner had. That baby, named Cornell Swinton Franklin, was born in Shanghai and lived 15 days — dying of pyaemia and umbilical cord infection. Two years later, the Judge and wife had another boy and gave him the very same name. 

The idea of whom Alabama William and Estelle’s Alabama was named after: his Aunt Bama who lived in Memphis.

I’ve been reading Faulkner and Women, published 1986, to see if there are more mentions of Alabama and/or Aunt Bama.

Paternal grandmother Sallie Murry Falkner was the matriarch in Oxford. Her equivalent in Memphis was Alabama Leroy Falkner McLean, “The Colonel’s baby,” of whom the family said, when she dies and goes to Heaven, either she or G-d is going to have to move out. Faulkner once inscribed a book to a kinsman with a reference to Aunt ‘Bama, “who owns both of us.”