The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

These people witness Nancy's confrontation with Stovall and "tell about" it; the "ones that passed the jail" later that night hear Nancy singing and yelling and the jailer trying to make her stop (291).

The marshal, Jefferson's main police officer, arrests Nancy and accompanies her to jail. On the way, he stops - but does not arrest - Mr. Stovall after he kicks Nancy in the mouth, knocking out her teeth.

Mr. Stovall, the cashier in the Jefferson bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, knocks Nancy to the ground when she accuses him of having failed to pay her for sex.

In the old days Quentin's narrative evokes, the laundress' husbands sometimes "fetch and deliver" the clothes their wives have washed (290).

Quentin's narrative begins by evoking the "Negro women" who used to carry the clothes they had washed for their white customers in bundles on their heads (289); now they fetch and deliver it in automobiles or have lost their jobs to commercial laundry services.