"That Evening Sun(g)": Blues Inscribing Black Space in White Stories

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Peek, Charles A

When you think I'm workin', I ain't doin' a thing. (214)20

In "Rollin' Mill," the lover of a cocaine addict sings,

If you don't believe I'm right,

Let me come to see you jus' one night, (emphasis added,

Odum and Johnson 219)

Higginson notes a pertinent line in one of the more popular songs he identifies as spirituals: "Brudder, keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin' . . . / for dis world most done" (203). Whether he was aware of these particulars, Faulkner incorporates all these motifs in his thematic development of the story, and we well know that the thematic possibilities of dusk were not lost on him: he inscribed the word "Twilight" on the first page of the original draft of The Sound and the Fury, the novel which bears the most obvious relation to "That Evening Sun" (Millgate 86). Twilight comes up again in a conversation between Faulkner and Ben Wasson. Peters captures the moment this way: "Faulkner was reported to have been so captivated by the quiet sublimity of darkness in his youth that he once said to his friend Ben Wasson, while listening to Beethoven on the victrola: 'Even light can be too much distraction when music is being played. . . . Listen to those horns of triumph and joy crying their golden sounds in agreat twilight of sorrow'" (Peters 27).

One other use of the evening/twilight/night cluster may underlie the vocabulary of the "St. Louis Blues." Dena Epstein accounts Charity Bowery's singing a song to illustrate the kind of singing that was repressed following "Old Prophet Nat [Turner's] slave rebellion." Bowery naturally suggests that the connection whites assumed between its words and their fear of slave uprisings was mistaken; it may in fact be both informative and to our purpose. One line in particular reads, "Afew more risings and settings of the sun /, Ere the winter will be over-/ Glory, Hallelujah! " (Epstein 230). This line is to be understood in the light of Floyd's understanding: "The blues, as had the spiritual earlier, spoke in code" (78).

Together with the tendency for black lyrics to function as codes or "secrets," these parallels suggest that the coming sundown in "St. Louis Blues" and hence in "That Evening Sun" heralds portentous changes in more than the domestic scenes of the story, changes encompassing shifts in population, breaking points of toleration, impending violence where oppression continues, and jubilee-all changes to be greeted by some whites with the kind of apprehension and regret noted at the opening of Quentin's narrative.21

Baker traces blues and other black music back to slave arts and experience, noting that

African slave narratives . . . reveal subtextual contours rich in "blues resources"-abundantly characterized, that is, by aspects of meaning which reveal profoundly brilliant economic strategies designed by Africans in the New World and the Old to negotiate the dwarfing spaces and paternally aberrant arrangements of western slavery. (31)

Seeing Jesus and Nancy singing the blues means seeing them negotiating a space for themselves. The story frames its ideological issues in metaphors of space: the roominess of the Compson house which we leave for the more restrictive lane, the smallness of the house where Nancy lives and which Jesus has left to find his own space. Nancy's claim to be "nothing but a nigger" in a three-line blues pattern is an ironic "song" by means of which she attempts to define some place for herself in a space not her own. It is not unrelated to her identification of herself with a queen in the story she tells the children, the pathos of which lies in the distance between her inability to escape her circumstances ("Then I gone" [307]) and her refusal to accept the flawed narrative others would inscribe upon her ("If you'd just let white men alone" [295]). Her blues are her voice, "inside and the shape of her" (302).