"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:
“[T]hat moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“A young person is a person with nothing to learn
One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
without running a nail in its feet. . . .
Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
Writing that the young are ones’ should not
undermine the self-confidence of which.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)