A wee bit of background with anecdotes: Faulkner's novels and stories are a chronicle of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha's county seat. These correspond with Lafayette County (pronounced with emphasis on FAY) and Oxford, Faulkner's home town, in the north central part of the state, about 85 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi, where the young Faulkner was enrolled long enough to make a D in the only English class he ever took. For his novel Absalom, Absalom! he drew a map of Yoknapatawpha County on which he marked where various events described in his fiction occurred. Main characters in some of the books appear in others as minor characters, as the author turned his attention first here and then somewhere else. Faulkner enthusiasts have constructed biographies of his characters from all the information that may be gleaned from the different fictions in which they appear. The Compson family is at the center of two of his best novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and "That Evening Sun" is narrated by one of the Compson children, Quentin, who says he was 9 years old when the events of the story occurred, 15 years ago. In Absalom, Absalom!, however, Quentin commits suicide at the end of his freshman year at Harvard. When Faulkner was asked about the problematic timeline, he replied that "these are my people" and "I can move them around if I want."
Another curiosity related to timeline comes into view once we get into the text of the story. We are told right away that the events we're going to hear about occurred 15 years ago, and we learn later that Quentin was then 9 years old (and his sister Caddy 7, and brother Jason 5). This means it would be possible for Quentin to comment upon the events from his adult perspective, but he does not. The narration seems limited to the point of view of someone 9 years old. Probably the best example of this relates to the most shocking incident of the story, when the Compson's black maid, Nancy, is arrested and then viciously assaulted by a white man:
. . . they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:
"When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since—" until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, "It's been three times now since you paid me a cent."
That was how she lost her teeth. . . .
The adult reader comprehends, as the 24-year-old narrator must, that the Compson family maid had a prostitution sidelight and one of her customers, a banker and deacon in the Baptist church, did not feel obliged to pay. Moreover, he felt free to assault her in the presence of the marshal. Only she went to jail. Mr Stovall obviously knew it was impossible for him to commit a crime against a black woman. This as I say is shocking, but the narration is flat, because it is limited to the perspective of a 9-year-old (even though the actual narrator is 24), who doesn't understand what it all means.
Let's ask two questions about this. (I.) Why, from the viewpoint of the narrator, Quentin Compson, who is either 9 or 24, depending on how you measure, is this incident in the story? (II.) Why, from the viewpoint of the actual storyteller, William Faulkner, is this incident in the story? The answer to the first question is that a 9-year-old white boy has noticed that the family's black maid is missing teeth and this incident explains why. It reveals something about Nancy. The answer to the second question is that the answer to the first question reveals something about Quentin Compson. Nine is old enough to be horrified, to say nothing of 24. But it seems he wasn't. And isn't.
Perhaps a good deal about the story may be comprehended if we keep always in mind this gap between "the story Quentin tells" and "Faulkner's story." Quentin directs our attention to Nancy. It develops that she's pregnant, and that her common law husband, Jesus [sic], is angry since the child is not of "his vine"—it's possible it's of the vine of a banker and Baptist church deacon. Jesus has left Nancy, but she's terrified that he's going to return and kill her. The Compson family is inconvenienced by her paralyzing fear: for example, she's afraid to leave their house to walk home at night, sleeps in their kitchen and, on one occasion, moves her pallet to the floor of the children's upstairs bedroom after being frightened by sounds in the kitchen below. Some of this is beyond the ken of 9-year-old Quentin, but the journalistic character of his account—what he saw, what he heard people say—permits the reader to understand more than he did.
And one thing a reader, but not Quentin, might perceive is that different members of the Compson family have different reactions to Nancy's troubles. The father (Jason Sr.) is somewhat sympathetic but mainly irritated. He tries to persuade Nancy that her fears are unwarranted. Twice he urges her to seek the counsel and assistance of "Aunt Rachel," her neighbor in the black part of town who sometimes said she was Jesus's mother and at other times denied it. You can almost make out Mr Compson's internal monologue: my life would be easier but for these ignorant Negroes and their inscrutable lives! Some of his irritability arises from the necessity of appeasing his wife, who in all the fictions about the Compsons is an almost disembodied voice, always complaining from another room. In "That Evening Sun" it's: I cannot have a Negro sleeping in my house. We pay taxes, why is it our job to protect this Negro? I can't believe you're proposing to leave me alone in this house in order to walk home a Negro.
Mrs Compson is a miserable specimen of humanity. Quentin doesn't say so, but Faulkner does, indirectly through Quentin.
The children's reaction is at first ambiguous and then at the end heartbreaking. In the last scene Nancy, who can't abide the thought of being alone, persuades them to accompany her home without permission of their parents, who have forbidden the kids to cross the ditch—symbolism!—that separates the homes of the whites from those of the blacks. But, once there, she is too distracted to be able to deliver on the fun she'd promised them. They feel uneasy. Eventually Mr Compson comes for them. As they prepare to leave, so that Nancy will be alone, her fear gives way to something more like resignation, and Quentin in his familiar flat manner reports the following detail:
"When yawl go home, I gone," Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. "Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr Lovelady." Mr Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings.
The Compsons leave. Mr Compson, from outside, tells Nancy to come and bolt the door, but she just sits in her chair by the fire. As they walk away, she's visible through the open door till they get to the ditch. Caddy and Jason start arguing. The 5-year-old says he's "not a nigger." The 7-year-old says, no, but he's "scairder than a nigger." Mr Compson admonishes, "Candace!"
Quentin had just reported himself asking the crushing question toward which the whole story was moving. "Who will do our washing now, Father?" he says.
The story's achievement is to evoke, in just a few pages, an entire culture, that of the American south around a half century after the Civil War, exhausted, decrepit, shot through with rot. The detail about the man collecting “insurance” money from people like Nancy! Characters like that in Dickens are bearable on account of a certain cartoonish aspect they tend to possess. There's something almost entertaining about their depravity. This one, though he has the Dickensian name of Mr Lovelady, is "short, dirty." Quentin Compson is just reporting, but the author's disgust is palpable.
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