Belle Worsham|Eunice Habersham

Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later. Mollie names her grandson after Belle's father, Samuel Worsham, and Belle reaches deep into her almost empty purse to help make sure that Samuel Worsham Beauchamp's body is brought home to get a proper burial in Yoknapatawpha county. More importantly, she shares what she calls "our grief" with Mollie and her black family (265, 363). In Intruder in the Dust she is called Eunice Habersham. There she demonstrates her loyalty to the Beauchamp family more actively, even heroically, when she joins Chick and Aleck Sander in the quest to save Molly Beauchamp's husband, Lucas, from being lynched; in that quest she repeatedly shows her grit without ever sacrificing her gentility. In all of these texts she ekes out a living by growing and selling chickens and vegetables. It's not clear why Faulkner decided to change her name, but she is still Eunice Habersham in her last, considerably smaller role in The Town, where she uses the "home-made truck that she peddles vegetables from" to deliver flowers to the ladies going to a dance in Jefferson (74).