This "bad man" is the antagonist of the story - a kind of grim fairy tale - that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). The question of the racial identity of this man, and the "queen" who also appears in Nancy's unfinished story, is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black.
This "queen" is the protagonist of the grim fairy tale that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). Like Nancy, she "has to cross a ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door," but is afraid of the "bad man" who is hiding in the ditch (303). The question of the racial identity of these characters is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black. This "queen" then is the only upper class Negro character in Faulkner's fiction.
Next to the church north of Frenchman's Bend is the rural graveyard where Lonnie Grinnup is buried in "Hand upon the Waters": "an unfenced straggle of cheap marble headstones and other graves outlined only rows of inverted glass jars and crockery and broken brick" (75).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Fri, 2018-08-03 22:52
This is the place where, according to Charles' speculations, Gavin and Linda might find themselves "fumbling and panting in a parked automobile like they were seventeen years old" (236). It seems clear from the novel as a whole that nothing like this ever happens, so this 'location' exists mainly or entirely in Charles' mind, and the place we assign it on the map is more than usually tenuous.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Fri, 2018-08-03 22:50
This is the place where, according to Charles' speculations in The Mansion, Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes might find themselves "fumbling and panting in a parked automobile like they were seventeen years old" (236). It seems clear from the novel as a whole that nothing like this ever happens, so this 'location' exists mainly or entirely in Charles' mind, and the place we assign it on the map is more than usually tenuous.
