The story that Faulkner tells in this text occurs because Dilsey gets sick, and the Compson family hires another black woman, Nancy, to take her place. For the first half of the story, "Dilsey is sick in her cabin" (292); she "gets well" in the second half, returning to cook dinner and supper on the story's last day (297).
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.
The last name of the Gibson family only appears once in The Sound and the Fury, the novel where they first appear: when Dilsey is addressed as "Sis Gibson" by other black members of the church she attends on Easter (290). Gibsons from three generations appear in a total of five Yoknapatawpha fictions, but like the Strothers family in Faulkner's various accounts of the Sartorises, this black African American family is almost exclusively defined in the context of the white family whom they serve. For the Gibsons, that's the Compsons.
At the start of Flags in the Dust, in Will Falls' re-telling about the time the Yankee patrol chased Colonel Sartoris away from his plantation, he reminds the Colonel's son Bayard that among the people living there was "yo' aunt, the one 'fo' Miss Jenny come" (22). According to Falls' story, she is "a full-blood Sartoris," but this is the only time Faulkner's fiction mentions her existence.
In both "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun the "half orphan" son of Doctor Habersham is eight years old when he first arrives at the Mississippi settlement with his widowed father (202, 6). As a grown man, he becomes the government's local Indian agent and marries a Chickasaw woman who is the granddaughter of either Issetibbeha (202; 7) or (in Requiem's second mention of the event, of Mohataha, 170).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-04-04 16:45
Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-04-04 16:36
Temple Drake Stevens' father does not appear in Requiem for a Nun, but Temple recalls his standards of morality against which she rebelled eight years ago: Then she had "unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing she knew they would forbid her to do if they had the chance. And they were right about the evil, and so of course she was right too" (108). The father was made memorable in Sanctuary by Temple's repetition of the phrase "My father's a judge."
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-04-04 16:01
The unnamed "jailor's wife" (199) whom a visitor to the jail meets in the prose section of Act III is presumably the same woman whom Eupheus Tubbs, the jailor, refers to as "Mrs Tubbs" in the dramatic section of Act III (208). Her quiet, deferential manner is suggested strongly, however, in the narrator's fantasy of the visitor who enters the jail looking for Cecilia Farmer's inscription on the old pane of glass and instead finds himself "without warning or preparation into the private quarters of a strange woman engaged in something as intimate as cooking a meal" (200).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-04-04 15:29
Tubbs, referred to in the play's dialogue as "JAILOR," is "a typical small-town turnkey" (206). He is talkative and deferential to the jail's visitors, but also and unintentionally insulting to visitors and prisoners alike. His racist and fundamentalist opinions are inextricably mixed with what he hopes to be courtesy. He is occasionally aware that he is "talking too much" (209) and tries to apologize for his behavior but he cannot seem to help himself from expressing his contradictory remarks.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-04-02 16:11
After the Civil War and her marriage, Cecilia Farmer becomes "the farmless mother of farmers (she would bear a dozen, all boys . . . ), bequeathing to them in their matronymic the heritage of that invincible inviolable ineptitude" (203).
