“James” here is better known, to his white kindred, as “Tennie’s Jim”–and, even more important, is the grandfather of the woman who becomes Roth’s lover, as she edgily informs Ike in “Delta Autumn”: “James Beauchamp–you called him Tennie’s Jim though he had a name–was my grandfather. I said you were Uncle Ike” (344). For it will be in “Delta Autumn” that the woman sketches out the rest of James Beauchamp’s story. (Also, Roth’s lover’s returning North, after having hoped for but not begging for, as she puts it, “Yes,” serves as a powerful analogue to the motives Roth assigns to James’ heading North.) Roth’s recollection above has “James,” which his lover calls him, but no mention of her, which at first made me think that the events of “The Fire and the Hearth” take place before he meets the woman. How to date this story, though?
Here’s a pro tip when reading a Faulkner story in which family history figures prominently: If a character keeps talking about how old s/he is, pay attention. In “The Fire and the Hearth,” that character is Lucas, who says several times that he is 67 years old. We learn in “The Bear” that he was born in 1874 (269), which means that “The Fire and the Hearth” occurs in 1941. “Delta Autumn,” though, occurs just before or right at the beginning of World War II–either 1939 (by Cleanth Brooks’ reckoning in his chart of the McCaslins in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, 448) or 1940 (according to the chart at the beginning of this post). Whichever year it is, though, “The Fire and the Hearth” clearly is set after “Delta Autumn,” yet the former story contains no mention whatsoever of Roth’s lover or the son he fathered by her–not even a sense of his loss, or even that he has lost anything or anyone at all.
Or perhaps there is, just a trace? I want to reread “The Fire and the Hearth” to see if there might be more to than this one trace, but I’ll say this for now: In “Delta Autumn,” the woman tells Ike that she had chosen not to reveal her family history (and, thus, their distant kinship) to Roth. Perhaps that is true. He does know that she has black blood, however, and that is the reason he does not marry her. I cannot help but wonder if it is out of his knowledge of her mixed blood, in combination with his memories of having been raised by Mollie Beauchamp (Lucas’s wife) that Roth’s use of “James” rather than “Tennie’s Jim” is in some quiet but marked sense Roth’s way of respecting and honoring the names that slaves and their descendants would give each other, and, thus, honoring the woman he had fallen in love with. As a man who knows he is a father but who had taken from himself the right to help choose a name for his son, Roth can at least do this little thing. He can preserve the names that his lover’s people wanted to be known by.