Hold On, Nancy

William Faulkner’s short story “That Evening Sun Go Down” is a chilling thriller set in his iconic Yoknapatawpha county. We are once again privy to the lives of the three Compson children, Caddy, Jason, and Quentin, our narrator. At this point in the children’s lives they are seven, five, and nine, respectively. In this story we are introduced to a new character, Nancy, a black servant to the Compson family. Nancy is a troubled individual, dabbling possibly in alcohol, prostitution, and cocaine. For the second half of the story she lives in fear of her delinquent husband who she thinks has returned to cut her with a razor. Though Faulkner leaves the biggest and most important leaps entirely up to the reader, he succeeds in creating the atmosphere of fear and depravity that Nancy herself lives in.
Nancy is an interesting and complex character. She serves as a foil to the Compsons’ usual housemaid, Dilsey, who is sick at the time of the story. Nancy’s rowdy and debauched life is strikingly juxtaposed with Dilsey’s diligent servitude. Dilsey is the typical submissive black servant of the South, calling her employer master and fawning over her children. Nancy, on the other hand, is rebellious of her job and refuses to be governed by her skin color. At the beginning of the story she refuses to get up and make the Compsons breakfast because she has to “get her sleep out.” Nancy is a prostitute, having sex with the white Mr. Stovall. Nancy’s rebellious nature is also seen when she attempts to escape from prison, hanging naked out of the window holding onto nothing but her dress. Nancy and Dilsey are two sides of the same coin, though, as they are both African American women in 1920s Deep South. They are both at the lowest of the chain, being both females and blacks. It is interesting to see this difference, though, and I think that Faulkner did a nice job depicting these two sides to black womanhood in the south.
The thriller element in this story is a new one, at least in my Faulknerian experience. Parts of “That Evening Sun Go Down” seemed more like Poe than Faulkner, but this simply proves that Faulkner is more diverse than I once thought him to be. The suspense in the second half the story over whether Jubah was really going to kill Nancy or if it was just her crazy imagination reminded me of “The Telltale Heart.” I found myself reading faster through Nancy’s walks back to her cabin in order to get her home safely. I think Faulkner masterfully crafted this story, and has once again hooked me into his writing.