Nancy Mannigoe

Nancy Mannigoe is "about thirty . . . with a calm impenetrable almost bemused face . . . a domestic servant, nurse to two white children, the second of whom, an infant, she smothered in its cradle" in what she considers a just cause (39). She appeared without a last name in the earlier story "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute; when Temple Drake Stevens tells Gavin Stevens and the governor that Nancy "made her debut into the public life of her native city while lying in the gutter with a white man trying to kick her teeth or at least her voice back down her throat" (96), she is alluding to an event in that story. Already sentenced to death, Nancy is sustained by belief in her own salvation. The last name Faulkner gives her in Requiem is, as the Governor points out to Gavin, phonetically the same as "Manigault. The old Charleston name" (94). Gavin goes further, replying that the name "Maingault" suggests that Nancy's heritage is still older, dating back to "Norman blood" (94). Peter Manigault, slave owner and politician in South Carolina, was probably the richest man in colonial America. (In the early 1930s, Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that included Nancy's story as treated in "That Evening Sun.")