Southern Slumber: A Rose for Emily

Tonight on Southern Slumber, settle in beneath the soft hush of the evening as we drift through William Faulkner's haunting short story, A Rose for Emily.

With slow narration and a calm bedtime atmosphere, we wander through the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. We follow the character of Emily Grierson, who once came from an old, prominent southern family. Time marches on for some, but not for others. 

Dim the lights, get cozy, and let the rhythm of the Southern story carry you gently toward sleep.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Southern Slumber Bedtime Stories for Sleep I'm glad you're here tonight. I'm Holly, and each week we visit a corner of the American South, where the air is warm, the sweet aroma of gardenias linger from the garden, and everything moves in slow motion. I'm going to share with you some southern literature, nature walks, letters, and anything else I find along the way that I think you'll enjoy. It'll be our gentle journey together as you drift off into a quiet, restful slumber. Wherever tonight's story takes you, there's no need to follow every word. You can simply drift in and out, letting the sound of my voice carry you. If sleep comes, you can let it. I'll be right here, reading as you rest. So close your eyes if you haven't already. Take a slow breath in and let it fall away. Tonight we travel to the deep south, to a small town in Mississippi, where the streets are shaded by magnolia trees and the delta rolls along hills as far as the eye can take you. Our story comes from William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of southern literature. This story is called A Rose for Emily. When Mrs. Gryerson died, our whole town went to her funeral. The men threw a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument. The women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man servant, the combined gardener and cook, had seen in at least ten years. It was a big squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolettes and spires and scroll balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood. Only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps, an eyesore among eyesaurs. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar, bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the Battle of Jefferson. Alive Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in eighteen ninety four when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, remissed her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have occupied charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermans, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper in an archaic shape, in a thin flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effects that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed without comment. They called a special meeting of the Board of Alderman. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door, through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving China painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old negro into a dim hall, from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse a close dankstore. They led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy leather covered furniture. When the negro opened the blinds of one window they could see that the leather was cracked, and when they sat down a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow moats in the single sunray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father. They rose when she entered, a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare. Perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of gow as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand. She did not ask them to serve. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. Her voice was dry and cold. I have no taxes in Jefferson, Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city record records and satisfy yourselves. But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff signed by him? I received a paper, yes, Miss Emily said. Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff. I have no taxes in Jefferson. But there is nothing on the books to show that. You see, we must go by the See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson. But Miss Emily C Colonel Satoris Well Colonel Satoris had been dead almost ten years. I have no taxes in Jefferson, Toby the Negro appeared. Show these gentlemen out. So she vanquished them horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the small about the smell. That was two years after her father's death. In a short time after her sweetheart, the one we believed would marry her, had deserted her. After her father's death, she went out very little. After her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was Toby, the young man then, going in and out with the market basket. Just as if a man, any man, could keep a kitchen properly, the ladies said, so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, heeming world and the high end and mighty Grierson's. A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor. Judge Stevens, eighty years old. But what will you have me to do about it, madam? he said. Why, send her word to stop it, the woman said. Isn't there a law? I'm sure that won't be necessary, Judge Stevens said. It's probably just a snake or a rat that to that Toby of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it. The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in indiffident deprecation. We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to get something done. That night the board of aldermen met. Three greybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation. It's simple enough, he said. Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it, and if she doesn't, damn it, sir, Judge Stevens says, Will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad? So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings, while one of them performed a regular sewing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted, and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her and her upright torso motionless, as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locust that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away. That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old Lady Wyatt, her great aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spradled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horse whip, the two of them framed by the backflung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated. Even with insanity in the family, she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized. When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her, and in a way people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill of the old despair of a penny more or less. The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid as it is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual, and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her and the doctors trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl with a vague resemblance to those angels and colored church windows, sort of tragic and serene. The town had just left the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death, they began the work. The construction company came with staff and mules and machinery and a four man named Homer Barron, a Yankee, a big, dark, ruddy man with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss, singing in time to the rise and fall of the pits. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow wheeled buggy in the matched team of bays from the livery stable. At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest because the ladies all said, Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a northerner, a day laborer. But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said poor Emily, her kinfolk should come to her. She had some kin in Alabama, but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even represented at the funeral. And as soon as old people said poor Emily, the whispering began. Do you suppose it's really so they said to one another? Of course it is. What else could this behind their hands, rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalaces closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the then swift clop clop clop of the matched team passed. Poor Emily. She carried her head high enough, even when we believed that she had fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson, as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison. Arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say poor Emily, and while the two female cousins were visiting her. I want some poison, she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes, and a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets, as you imagine a lighthouse keeper's face ought to look. I want some poison, she said. Yes, Miss Emily, what kind for rats and such? I'd ru I want the best you have. I don't care what kind. The druggist named several. They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is arsenic, Miss Emily said. Is that a good one? Is arsenic um yes, ma'am, but what you want I want arsenic? The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. Why, of course, the druggist said, if that's what you want, but the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for. Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye until he looked away. And he went and got arsenic and wrapped it up. Hoby the delivery boy brought her the package. The druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home, there was written on the box under the skull and bones for rats. So the next day we all said she will kill herself and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said she will marry him. Then we said she will persuade him, yes, because Homer himself had remarked he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men and the Elks, in the Elks Club, that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, poor Emily, behind the jalices as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high, and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whips and a yellow glove. Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister, Miss Emily's people were episcopal, to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets. And the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama. So she had bloodkin under her roof again, and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jewelers and ordered a men's toilet seat in silver with the letters HB on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said they are married. We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more griarsome than Miss Emily had ever been. So we were not surprised when Homer Baron, the streets had been finished some time since, was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing off, but we believed he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. By that time it was a cable, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins. Sure enough, after another week they departed, and as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barrison was back in town. A neighbor saw Toby and admitted him to the kitchen in the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. Toby went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime. But for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too, as if that quality of her father, which had thwarted her woman's life so many times, had been too virulent and too furious to die. When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper and salt iron gray when it ceased turning. Up until the day of her death at seventy four, it was still that vigorous iron gray like the hair of an active man. From that time on her front door remained closed, say for a few for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays, with a twenty five cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile, her taxes had been remitted. Then the new generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them. Daily, monthly, yearly, we watched the negro grow grayer and more astute, Toby going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows. She had evidently shut up the top floor of the house, like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us. We could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation, dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse. And so she died. Phil ill in the house, filled with dust and shadows, not with only a daughtering Toby to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick. We had long since given up trying to get any information from Toby. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disease. She died in one of the downstairs, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her grey head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight. Toby met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their husband, sibilant voices and their quick curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was never seen again. The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crown face of her father musing profoundly above year with the ladies sibilant and macabre, and the very old men, some in their brushed Confederate uniforms on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but instead a huge meadow, which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years. Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it. The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon the room decked and furnished, as for a bridle, upon the violence curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal, and the man's toilet things, backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and a tie, as if they had just been removed, which lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded, beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks. The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while he just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. Body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricably from the bed in which he lay, and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in one second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron grey hair. That is the end of a rose for Emily. It's come to a close. Take one more slow breath in and out. And thank you for spending this quiet time with me. I'll be here again soon with another story to help you rest. Good night.