Rider

Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts. Each perspective - that of the third-person narrator and then that of the white deputy sheriff who tries to tell his wife about Rider after he is lynched - describe him as powerful, even superhuman in his strength, "better than six feet and weighing better than two hundred pounds" (129, 238). At 24 he is the head of a sawmill work gang, and he rents a cabin on the Carothers-Edmonds place which for the last six months he has shared with his new wife. But each narrative represents his overwhelming grief at Mannie's death very differently. To the racist deputy, Rider's behavior proves that he seems lacks "the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings" (147). But in the main narrative, readers see a profoundly emotional man who, as he himself says in the last line we hear him speak, "just can't quit thinking" (255) - which is the same problem that haunts Faulkner's aristocratic white males like Quentin Compson. In Requiem for a Nun Temple Drake Stevens describes his grief and despair and the way he "cuts a white man's throat with a razor in a dice game" (156), but her brief re-telling of his story does not mention the lynching.