disjointed marble columns were landed from an Italian ship at New Orleans,
into a steamboat up the Mississippi to Vicksburg, and into a smaller
steamboat up the Yazoo and Sunflower and Tallahatchie, to Ikkemotubbe's
old landing which Sutpen now owned, and thence the twelve miles by oxen
into Jefferson: the two identical four-column porticoes, one on the north
and one on the south, each with its balcony of wroughtiron New Orleans
grillwork, on one of which-the south one-in 1861 Sartoris would stand in
the first Confederate uniform the town had ever seen, while in the Square
below the Richmond mustering officer enrolled and swore in the regiment
which Sartoris as its colonel would take to Virginia as a part of Bee, to
be Jackson's extreme left in front of the Henry house at First Manassas,
and from both of which each May and November for a hundred years, bailiffs
in their orderly appointive almost hereditary succession would cry without
inflection or punctuation either 'oyes oyes honorable circuit court of
Yoknapatawpha County come all and ye shall be heard' and beneath which for
that same length of time too except for the seven years between '63 and
'70 which didn't really count a century afterward except to a few
irreconcilable old ladies, the white male citizens of the county would
pass to vote for county and state offices, because when in '63 a United
States military force burned the Square and the business district, the
courthouse survived. It didn't escape: it simply survived: harder than
axes, tougher than fire, more fixed than dynamite; encircled by the
tumbled and blackened ruins of lesser walls, it stifl stood, even the
topless smoke-stained columns, gutted of course and roofless, but immune,
not one hair even out of the Paris architect's almost forgotten plumb, so
that all they had to do (it took nine years to build; they needed
twenty-five to restore it) was put in new floors for the two storeys and
a new roof, and this time with a cupola with a four-faced clock and a bell
to strike the hours and ring alarms; by this time the Square, the banks
and the stores and the lawyers' and doctors' and dentists' offices, had
been restored, and the English sparrows were back too which had never
really deserted-the garrulous noisy independent swarms which, as though
con-
204 WILLIAM FAULKNER
comitant with, inextricable from regularised and roted human quarreling, had
appeared in possession of cornices and gutterboxes almost before the last
nail was driven-and now the pigeons also, interminably murmurous, nesting
in, already usurping, the belfry even though they couldn't seem to get used
to the bell, bursting out of the cupola at each stroke of the hour in
frantic clouds, to sink and burst and whirl again at each succeeding stroke,
until the last one: then vanishing back through the slatted louvers until
nothing remained but the frantic and murmurous cooing like the fading echoes
of the bell itself, the source of the alarm never recognised and even the
alarm itself unremembered, as the actual stroke of the bell is no longer
remembered by the vibration-fading air. Because they-the sparrows and the
pigeons ndured, durable, a hundred years, the oldest things there except the
courthouse centennial and serene above the town most of whose people now no
longer even knew who Doctor Habersharn and old Alec Holston and Louis
Grenier were, had been; centennial and serene above the change: the
electricity and gasoline, the neon and the crowded cacophonous air; even
Negroes passing beneath the balconies and into the chancery clerk's office
to cast ballots too, voting for the same white-skinned rascals and
demagogues and white supremacy champions that the white ones did-durable:
every few years the county fathers, dreaming of bakshish, would instigate a
movement to tear it down and erect a new modern one, but someone would at
the last moment defeat them; they will try it again of course and be
defeated perhaps once again or even maybe twice again, but no more than
that. Because its fate is to stand in the hinterland of America: its doom is
its longevity; like a man, its simple age is its own reproach, and after the
hundred years, will become unbearable. But not for a little while yet; for
a little while yet the sparrows and pigeons: garrulous myriad and
independent the one, the other uxorious and interminable, at once frantic
and tranquil-until the clock strikes again which even after a hundred years,
they still seem unable to get used to, bursting in one swirling explosion
out of the belfry as though, the boiir, instead of merely adding one puny
infinitesimal more to the long weary increment since Genesis, had shattered
the virgin pristine air with the first loud dingdong of time and doom.
Scene One
Courtroom. 5:30 P.m. November thirteenth.
The curtain is down. As the lights begin to go up:
MAN'S VOICE
(behind the curtain) Let the prisoner stand.
The curtain rises, symbolising the rising of the prisoner in the dock, and
revealing a section of the courtroom. It does not occupy the whole stage,
but only the upper left half, leaving the other half and the bottom of the
stage in darkness, so that the visible scene is not only spotlighted but
elevated slightly too, a further symbolism which will be clearer when Act
Il opens-the symbolism of the elevated tribunal of justice of which this,
a county court, is only the intermediate, not the highest, stage.
This is a section of the court-the bar, the judge, officers, the opposing
lawyer, the jury. The defense lawyer is Gavin Stevens, about fifty. He
looks more like a poet than a lawyer and actually is: a bachelor,
descendant of one of the pioneer Yoknapatawpha County families, Harvard
and Heidelberg educated, and returned to his native soil to be a sort of
bucolic Cincinnatus, champion not so much of truth as of justice, or of
justice as he sees it, constantly involving himself, often for no pay,
in affairs of equity and passion and even crime too among his people,
white and Negro both, sometimes directly contrary to his office of County
Attorney which he has held for years, as is the present business.
The prisoner is standing. She is the only one standing in the room-a
Negress, quite black, about thirty-that is, she could be almost anything
between twenty and forty-with a calm impenetrable almost bemused face,
the tallest, highest there with all eyes on her but she herself not
looking at any of them, but looking out and up as though at some distant
corner of the room, as though she were alone in it. She is-or until
recently, two months ago to be exact-a domestic servant, nurse to two
white children, the second of whom, an infant, she smothered in its
cradle two months ago, for which act she is now on trial for her life.
But she has probably done many things else-chopped cotton, cooked for
working gangs-any sort of manual labor within her capacities, or rather,
limitations in time and availability, since her principal reputation in
the little Mississippi town where she was bom is that of a tramp-
205
206 WILLIAM FAULKNER
a drunkard, a casual prostitute, being beaten by some man or cutting or
being cut by his wife or his other sweetheart. She has probably been