The Sole Black Man

The strangest character in this entire short story would have to be the black servant. He is the one character who has no motivation that I can discern and he seems to have no real point in the entire story except to explain why Emily was able to eat and do what she needed without ever leaving the house for years at a time. At the same time, he easily escaped the harsher punishments of prejudice from officials and from lesser people, either by simply working in the mansion or being able to state that he worked for Emily. It might have been possible for the officials to have found out more about Emily or what secrets the mansion might have hid if they had taken the servant, killed or interrogated him and entered the mansion themselves. While this is something that other Southern people would have found no problem with, it never happened anyways. The black servant was able to get away from the entire situation after Emily died, and finally left the house out of the back door and effectively disappeared before anyone realized that there was a murdered body inside of Emily’s home. But the question that comes up, again, is why was he there to begin with and why did he keep the secret anyways? If he was a simple servant only following orders, then it is more likely that he would have remained within the mansion even after Emily had died. By running away he seemed more like someone who was forced to remain within the home by some strange power that Emily seemed to have or something she had and held over his head.
Now it would have been strange and unlikely for the servant to have been the actual lover/murderer of the late Homer Barron, but that would have been enough to give us a better understanding of why he was still there.
If in fact the reason that he stayed was because of his duty to his mistress and her house, then he was worldlier than his mistress was or any other “duty-bound” servants might be. Willing to survive, get paid, he followed orders and even kept dirty secrets, but knew that once the dead body was found, he would have been implicated as an accomplice to murder and likely hung either by trial or a lynching mob. So he escaped, deciding to keep up with the role until the last minute and while people would be searching around and becoming confused by the sight of the dead body, escape and find a way to survive his final years peacefully (Considering he was also a fairly old person).
This is, of course, speculation but it is put forward to allow for a better explanation than the one that the story gives us (Which is none).