Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page B

I
    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 II 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 lawyers, 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 born is that of a tramp—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 married, at least once. Her name—or so she calls it and would probably spell it if she could spell—is Nancy Mannigoe.
    There is a dead silence in the room while everybody watches her.

    Judge
    Have you anything to say before the sentence of the court is pronounced upon you?
    Nancy neither answers nor moves; she doesn’t even seem to be listening.

    That you, Nancy Mannigoe, did on the ninth day of September, wilfully and with malice aforethought kill and murder the infant child of Mr and Mrs Gowan Stevens in the town of Jefferson and the County of Yoknapatawpha . . .

    It is the sentence of this court that you be taken from hence back to the county jail of Yoknapatawpha County and there on the thirteenth day of March be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.

    Nancy
    (quite loud in the silence, to no one, quite calm, not moving)

    Yes, Lord.
    There is a gasp, a sound, from the invisible spectators in the room, of shock at this unheard-of violation of procedure: the beginning of something which might be consternation and even uproar, in the midst of, or rather above which, Nancy herself does not move. The judge bangs his gavel, the bailiff springs up, the curtain starts hurriedly and jerkily down as if the judge, the officers, the court itself were jerking frantically at it to hide this disgraceful business; from somewhere among the unseen spectators there comes the sound of a woman’s voice—a moan, wail, sob