"That Evening Sun" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1931 on the collection These 13, which included Faulkner's most anthologized story, "A Rose for Emily". "That Evening Sun" is a dark portrait of white Southerners' indifference to the crippling fears of one of their African-American employees, Nancy. The story is narrated by Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and concerns the reactions of him and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, to an adult world that they do not fully understand. The African-American washerwoman, Nancy, fears that her common-law husband Jesus is seeking to murder her because she is pregnant with a white man's child. The title is taken from a blues song by William Christopher Handy, although there is no mention of this in the story.
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Famous quotes containing the words evening and/or sun:
“O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake of its dull patience,—in winter expecting the sun of spring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)