In September 1934, John Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter, now free, met up at a hotel in Marshall, Texas. Alan was sick, and Ledbetter would take his place driving and assisting Lomax with the ongoing music collection on behalf of the Library of Congress (now that collecting for American Ballads was complete). This chapter explores the backgrounds of each man, both of whom were brought by their families to Texas as young children, and the very different opportunities and challenges they faced in the Jim Crow South.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

Summary: The exploitation of peasants by moneylenders has been conventionally put forward as an explanation for persistent rural poverty. Governments in colonial and post-colonial India repeatedly intervened to correct power imbalance in credit markets. This chapter traces the design and impact of the origins of credit intervention in South India, investigating how lenders responded to the Madras Agriculturists Relief Act (MARA) implemented in 1937. The MARA enforced a ceiling on interest rates far below the rates charged in the unregulated market. Intervention had unintended effects. The MARA reduced credit availability, and the market operated both less equitably and less efficiently than it did before. Paradoxically, efforts to formally regulate credit disassociated the market from administrative procedures as lenders went underground and a black market for loans emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. A policy approach that prioritised equity over efficiency, the MARA failed to address the underlying reasons behind the high costs and shortage of capital.