DY Header CLOSE WINDOW

Sanctuary
Manuscript, page 27. Transcription follows image.
Page 27, Sanctuary Ms
William Faulkner Foundation Collection, 1918-1959, Accession #6074 to 6074-d, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections,
University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.   [Item Metadata: IA:6) SANCTUARY Autograph manuscript. 138 p. (137 R, 1 V) on 137 l. Slipcase. ]


TRANSCRIPTION

her head bent, tongue in cheek, her still babyish hands moving like [illegible] ink upon the white cloth, with the ter-
rific awkwardness of a monkey or a coon.

"Yes, sir," Aunt Jenny said. "I cant have any idle folks around me. If you want to be a house nigger, that is. Or
maybe you dont? Maybe you want to be a field-hand and wear shoes and stockings only on Sunday?"

Saddie giggled. Bent over the work she continued to chuckle. "Nome, Miss Jenny," she said, her voice going on in
rich, dying chuckles, as though of its own accord.

"She oughtn't to try to sew in that light," Horace said. "I can hardly see her hands on the cloth, even."

"Fiddlesticks. They're part owl, anyway. Aint you, gal?"

Without looking up Saddie chuckled, rich, [illegible], like small [water?]. "Nome, Miss Jenny. I aint no owl."

"What are you then?" Saddie bent over her slow, terrific hands, the cap crisp upon her neat pig-tails. "Who made
you, then?" Miss Jenny said.

"God made me. Ise a child of God." She said it in a fainting, rapturous voice; immediately she was about to
chuckle again.

"You, nigger gal! Why did He make you?" Saddie hung her head above her unceasing hands. "You, nigger! Talk
out!"

"For His greater glory," Saddie said.

"And what are you after that?"

"Ise a Sartoris han' maiden."

"Why couldn't you say so, then?" Miss Jenny turned her head and gave Horace's back a benevolent glance.
"What do you think of that?"

"Habet, O most eminent republican," he said, looking at the miniature. The curls were still there, the eyes bold
and merry, the mouth sweet. It was flanked on one side by a hasty snapshot. Both operator and subject ap-
peared to have been moving when the camera snapped, for the picture was both lop-sided and blurred as well
as slightly out of focus. The subject's head emerged from an elliptical manhole in a tubular affair on the side
of which the effigy of a rabbit projected its pointed ears into the picture. To the front arc of the pit a narrow
screen curved tightly, and two struts slanted upward into a flat surface at right angles in horizontal per-
spective, from which the pistol grip of a machine-gun tilted. The face, beneath a wild thatch, was in the act of
turning when the camera snapped. It was full of movement, travestied by the dead celluloid, the eys squinted
and the mouth open, as though he were shouting or laughing.

On the other side the miniature was flanked by another conventional photograph. In uniform, with orderly hair,
he lounged in a leather chair placed cleverly to bring the subdued light onto his bleak, humorless face, and again
Horace looked toward the fire, at the boy leaning there, at the brooding face, the mouth emerging sullenly from the soft
chiaroscuro of childhood, then back to the bleak eyes, the sullen mouth of the photograph.

"Did you see the last one?" Miss Jenny said. "Gowan snapped it."

"He went to Virginia too," the boy said. "But he wasn't an aviator like my father was."

The next row consisted of 9 photographs of the boy, one for each of his years, ranging from that in which he sprawled
naked on a fur rug, through his various avatars in rompers, velet; as an Indian, a cowboy, a soldier, a groomsman
in a diminutive tailcoat, to the final one in which he sat the pony, erect, hand on hip, a salvaged revolver frame in his
waistband, a small negro perched like a monkey on the withers of a gaunt mule in the background. This was Sandy,
Saddie's twin; Saturday and Sunday; Horace had named them – two minute creatures with still, shiny eyes like 4
shoebuttons, born to Elnora the cook, a tall coffee-colored woman in middle life and unmarried at the time.

Narcissa entered, with a newspaper. She drew a chair up and opened the paper and began to read aloud, lurid