Frony Gibson

Frony Gibson is a member of the black family that lives on the Compson place as servants, and the daughter of Roskus and Dilsey. In The Sound and the Fury she appears in Benjy's memories as a child about the same age as Quentin and Caddy Compson, and in the last section as an adult who still lives close enough to Dilsey to walk to church with her mother on Easter Sunday. She is also Luster's mother, though the novel does not indicate if she has a husband or if, like Caddy's daughter, Luster was conceived out of wedlock. As a person (and unlike Quentin and Caddy) she seems realistic, even stoical, about life: when in Benjy's section Caddy says that "white folks dont have funerals," she replies "Your grandmammy dead as any nigger can get, I reckon" (33); when in the last section Dilsey asks her what she'll do if it rains on her new dress, she replies, "Git wet, I reckon" (290). She is only mentioned in "That Evening Sun," but appears again in the "Appendix Compson" that Faulkner wrote 16 years after the novel. She no longer lives in Yoknapatawpha, having "married a pullman porter" and gone to St. Louis to live with him before moving "to Memphis to make a home for her mother" (343).