The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.

Storytime: I don’t know where “That Evening Sun” falls in the official pantheon of William Faulkner’s short stories, wherever that pantheon may be. In mine, it crowds in among his many better ones. The narrator remembers a few nights from 15 years before when he was a boy in Jefferson, when Nancy, a Black woman, did the family’s wash and impressed the boy and his siblings when she’d bundle and balance a mass of linen on her head, set a straw hat on top of it all, and walk self-assured through any obstacle. It “never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence.” She could balance the family’s laundry on her head. She was not as deft with her common-law husband Jesus after he learns that she is pregnant with a white man’s child. The implication is that she’d been raped. (She was also beaten senseless after she demanded the money a white customer owed her. She ended up in jail and tried to hang herself.) “‘I aint nothing but a n—,’ Nancy said. ‘It aint none of my fault.’” Jesus doesn’t care. He disappears. (After Faulkner submitted the story to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Mencken demanded that Jesus’s name be changed to Jubah and a sexual metaphor be excised. Faulkner restored the cuts when the story appeared in These 13, the 1931 collection that included “A Rose for Emily.”) She is convinced that he is going to murder her, that he’s hiding somewhere, ready to spring at her when no one is around. She takes refuge at her employer’s house. The children understand nothing. They make fun of her fears. She is all self-abnegation, they are all caddy and cruel, bickering and getting on her case. Their father allows her to spend a night at the family’s house, but his wife doesn’t allow that to go on. “I can’t have Negroes sleeping in the bedrooms,” she says. She wants her husband to call the cops. But the officers can’t find Jesus if Nancy hasn’t seen him. She’s on her own. She asks the children to walk her back to her house and stay the night with her there. “She was talking loud when we crossed the ditch and stooped through the fence where she used to stoop through with the clothes on her head. Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. The smell of the house was like the lamp and the smell of Nancy was like the wick, like they were waiting for one another to begin to smell. She lit the lamp and closed the door and put the bar up. Then she quit talking loud, looking at us.” She begs them to stay. She is all terror. They are all afraid with an otherworldly terror particular to children–that their parents won’t be happy with them being gone. They have no idea why Nancy is afraid, no sympathy, no capability of empathy. Into the night the children’s father comes to get them and Nancy tells him she got the sign Jesus was coming for her. He’d left “a hog bone, with blood meat still on it,” on the table. “He’s out there. When yawl walk out that door, I gone.” “Gone where, Nancy?” one of the children asks, still understanding nothing. They leave her sitting by the fire: that aloneness comparable to the lonely death we all die. We never know what happens to her, but we can guess. The children never know her terror. They keep teasing each other on their way home, oblivious to the grave they left behind, though the narrator’s memory suggests that something registered enough to be remembered, even if still without conscience. The story’s empathy with primal fear skims over the memory like the smell of Nancy’s house, which stays with you long after you’ve read the story.

—P.T.