Unnamed Negro Women

The "Negro women" in "A Rose for Emily" appear only in a negative phrase identifying Colonel Sartoris as the Jefferson mayor who "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (119-20). We hear nothing else about these women or this edict, whether they complied or it was enforced or when it might have been rescinded. The "apron" would have typified, not to say stereo-typified, all black women as domestic servants. Throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions many if not most of the 'Negro women' characters occupy that place in the social system, but the mayor's sumptuary rule seeks to put an entire population in that place.