GibsonsInSF

The Gibsons are one of the two families - one white, one black - at the center of this novel. The parallels between them are very suggestive. The Compsons: a mother who fancies herself a Christian, a father who dies, three sons (the oldest of whom leaves Yoknapatawpha for Massachusetts), one daughter and her child. The Gibsons: a mother who is a Christian, a father who dies, two sons (the older of whom leaves Yoknapatawpha for Memphis), one daughter and her child. In neither instance is the father of the child identified, and both children live with their grandmothers. Dilsey is Faulkner's first major black character, and Gibsons appear in over one-third of the novel's 463 Events (as we have defined Events), though this is mainly because so much of it is set at Compson place, where Dilsey does all the cooking and other housework and where her sons and grandson work as Benjy's caretakers. Dilsey herself plays such a large and impressive part in the novel's last section that many critics refer to it as 'Dilsey's section'; when narrative goes with her, Frony, Luster and Benjy to the Easter service in Jefferson's African American church, it locates the Gibsons in their own context as blacks living in the modern South. But the narrative never really gives Dilsey or her family parity with the Compsons. Even in that last section, what happens to Dilsey in church is made most significant as an ironic contrast to what happens to Jason Compson in the section's other main narrative, when "from time to time he passes churches" on his drive to Mottston in his frantic, futile quest to recover the money his niece took (306). Individual members of the Gibson family acquire a powerful individuality, especially the tough-minded Frony, who even as a child knows that when Caddy climbs the tree expecting to see a "party," what awaits her is really a "funeral" (36) - and that if it rains on Easter, she and her new dress will "git wet" (290). As Frony repeats, "I knows what I knows" (36, 38, 39). There are even a few scenes that take place in Dilsey's cabin, though they are described as they recur in Benjy's memory, and what he remembers most vividly is the "smell" of this black residence (28). In other words, this African American family is still defined almost entirely in terms of the story the novel is really interested in, the story of the white family that the blacks serve for generations.