Yet Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about history, and it is the South's history of slavery and miscegenation--and the shame sometimes associated with that history--that contributed to the destruction of the Sutpen family. Thomas Sutpen may be framed in the narrative as a man with no past, but he is actually a man with a hidden past, and Charles Bon stands as evidence of that past. Cleanth Brooks believed that Faulkner saw "the past as a living force in the present, a force that molds our sense of the present." So the past can never be escaped.

That is why the narrative of Absalom, Absalom! is propelled by history's ghosts, by what is hidden. Like the ghosts of history of the American South Faulkner confronts in Absalom, Absalom!, the history of American universities is tied to the institution of slavery, which once only had a ghostlike presence but now is real and present. Given Faulkner's belief that the past is a living force in the present, slavery at the University of Mississippi is something that we must now examine in its connection with the narrative of Absalom, Absalom! At the University of Mississippi, as well as at Harvard, where Quentin Compson tells the story of the Sutpen family to his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, slavery was used to raise buildings, maintain campuses, and enhance institutional wealth. As Craig Steven Wilder notes in his book Ebony & Ivy--a study of the intertwined history of slavery, race, and higher education--American colleges and universities also "trained the personnel and cultivated the ideas that accelerated and legitimated the dispossession of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Modern slavery required the acquiescence of scholars and the cooperation of academic institutions."

The connection between Faulkner's fiction and the slaves who helped  build the University of Mississippi helps us see a new narrative that is evolving about Faulkner, slavery, and the University of Mississippi. In particular, the direct link between Faulkner's Rowan Oak and a group of slaves that constructed the University of Mississippi evokes questions about how Faulkner constructed the relationship between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, a relationship that has the University of Mississippi as a backdrop. Whether or not Faulkner had knowledge of the connections between the University of Mississippi and slavery, this new narrative twist makes us look at this relationship--as well as its historical context--in a new light. As noted earlier, Faulkner famously withheld information to propel his narratives.