Word: convicted
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Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats...
...pregnant - a quiet, pale girl dressed in a calico wrapper, a sunbonnet and part of an old army uniform. He gets her into the boat, pushes off. From this point on it is the convict against the Mississippi-he trying to get the boat and the woman back to the guards, the Mississippi plunging him through thickets, over cotton fields, up past Vicksburg and down past Baton Rouge, past dead cows, bobbing outhouses; and leaving him the exhausted, hungry, indignant victim of nature on the loose...
When he tries to land at Baton Rouge, soldiers guarding the levee see his convict uniform, open fire. Out in the current again, the boat whirls downstream. Miles from nowhere, on an old Indian mound crowded with snakes, the baby is born. After six days the convict gets so he thinks, "It ain't nothing but another moccasin," when he steps on a snake...
...convict, woman and baby are rescued, get mixed up with Chinese muskrat hunters from the Louisiana swamps, are turned loose, drift to the house of a kind-hearted French-speaking Cajun alligator hunter, somewhere near the Gulf. When the convict sees his first alligator, and understands that it is to be killed, he thinks, "Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot looks big to a man that never walked up to one with a halter before." With that he jumps overboard, catches the alligator around the neck, stabs it. The convict becomes a local hero...
That chapter closes when engineers blow up the levee to save New Orleans, and the convict, the woman and the baby have to move on again. Six weeks from the time he had been washed away, the convict gets back to the place where his journey began. "Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman," he tells the deputy sheriff. "But I never did find that bastard on the cotton house." The deputy and the warden repeating "Them convicts," slap another ten years on his sentence for trying to escape...