or to fully grasp the situation himself, the objective tone of the story—reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner's contemporary—hints at the profound emotional impact Nancy's terror has on him.

"I hate to see that evening sun go down," sings W. C. Handy in "St. Louis Blues," expressing the singer's grief over a lover's absence. In the song, the sorrow at sunset highlights the loneliness brought on by the lover's departure. For Nancy, however, "that evening sun" signifies the threat from her missing partner. Jesus—whose name likely serves as an ironic nod by Faulkner—embodies menace and violence for Nancy, lurking until nightfall to strike. Jesus is portrayed as a stereotypical figure from racist Southern folklore: the dangerous, violent black man who attacks women with a knife or razor after dark. During the Jim Crow era, newspapers and magazines frequently exaggerated or invented crimes supposedly committed by black men against white women to inflame racial prejudice.

Although the story touches on such aspects of early twentieth century southern life as the imposition of technology on a culture of traditional handicrafts, the awkward and frequently cruel adjustments of the races to social change, and the inequality of the races under the law, “That Evening Sun” is mainly a story about fear—fear rendered all the more terrible by Nancy’s total isolation among others who cannot understand, share, or relieve it.

The title of the story derives from a well-known blues song. Nancy’s moaning, which Quentin, one of the Compson children, describes as “not singing and not unsinging,” occurs when the evening sun goes down and her imagination is most active. Her state exceeds ordinary blues melancholy, with the result that her “unsinging” lies beyond the control of music to give pleasure or consolation. Quentin, the narrator, knows what has happened to Nancy, but neither he nor anyone else in the story understands her despair or the all-consuming nature of her terror.

On the night that the family allows Nancy to sleep in the kitchen, she awakens them with her moaning but is too frightened even to respond to the question of whether she has actually seen her husband lurking outside. Given a cup of coffee, she cannot hold it and does not notice that the coffee has spilled out. The children’s naïve questions concerning what she has done to make Jesus so angry only add to her despair.

Ultimately, she is left to the mercy of the Compson children. If they leave her, she must face the uncertainty of the night alone. Her story to the children about a queen winds up with that royal lady pursued by a “bad man” in a ditch. Knowing that queens do not have to cross ditches, the children reject the story. In this and in a remarkable variety of other ways William Faulkner conveys her fear. She burns her hand on the hot globe of a lamp and does not notice the damage until Caddy calls her attention to it. She cannot concentrate on as simple a task as popping corn for the children and burns it all. She breaks into a cold sweat and inadvertently recommences her eerie moan. The arrival of Mr. Compson temporarily relieves her tension, but he has come to take the children home, and she is left to her private hell.

Although her husband has vowed vengeance against the presumably white father of Nancy’s child, she realizes that any such act against a white man would be suicidal and that if Jesus does take action, she can expect to be the target. The Compson family are uncomprehending in their various ways. Mrs. Compson simply resents her husband’s leaving her to take a part-time servant home, the children are too young to understand what besides skin color and external subservience distinguishes blacks from themselves, and Mr. Compson’s suggestion to Nancy that she “let white men alone” indicates how little he fathoms her vulnerable situation.

Nancy has neither the sense of belonging to a settled familial and social order, such as that to which her slave ancestors could cling, nor any enforceable legal rights such as those a person in her position might begin to enjoy a half century later. Her nominal rights have been ignored, her unfortunate relationship with a contemptible white man has disfigured her face, and her husband’s subsequent abandonment of her has destroyed such stability as her life had offered. Unlike the earlier slave generations, she must contend with the threat of unemployment and the caprices of her white employers. Although Dilsey has steady work and an obviously secure place within a household, Nancy represents the nominally free black woman at the mercy of a husband who himself suffers, without any possibility of legal redress, bitter insults to his own manhood and may avenge himself by cruelty to her. She is, as she several times observes, “just a nigger,” and although she is religious, she feels that God will no more stand by a “hellborn” creature such as herself than will the Compsons.

It is important to realize that Faulkner not only has given a graphic picture of southern intolerance, injustice, and violence, which generates lonely terror in a person such as Nancy, but also has enacted fictionally a sensitivity and sympathy for such a victim that is ordinarily beyond the scope of those who have not lived in a town such as Jefferson. Even when, as in this story, there are no characters who share this sympathy—Dilsey is too much a mainstay of the Compson family to share the burdens of her temporary replacement—Faulkner’s story implies a moral responsibility unknown to the millions of Americans who have not been compelled to live with, or even notice the existence of, the Nancys and Jesuses of Faulkner’s region. “That Evening Sun” communicates not only the sins but also the conscience of the South, and the “I” who hates to see the evening sun go down is not only Nancy but also any reader whose conscience Faulkner’s story has constructed or reconstructed.