Mannie

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Mannie has been married to Rider for half a year when her sudden death (of unspecified causes) becomes the traumatic loss, the powerful absence, that generates the story. She is described as having a "narrow back" and "narrow" hand (241, 133). Rider indicates that she is far slighter than her powerfully built husband, but her spirit is strong: "You’s de onliest least thing whut ever kep up wid me one day, leff alone for weeks" (241, 133). She is present in the story in memories, traces of footprints in the road, the "clean overalls which Mannie herself had washed only a week ago" that Rider wears to her funeral (238, 129), and a brief, ghostly presence that Rider sees upon returning home after Mannie’s burial. When Temple Drake Stevens re-tells this story, briefly, in Requiem for a Nun, both she and Rider are unnamed, and she dies "only two weeks" after marrying her husband (156).