Unnamed Negro Aunt in Vicksburg

This woman lives in Vicksburg with her family, and was willing to take in her niece after her father's death. When this niece tells McCaslin that her aunt "took in washing," he suddenly realizes the racial nature of the "effluvium" she brings with her (278, 277). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, the women who wash clothes are always Negroes. (When Faulkner revised "Delta Autumn" into a chapter of Go Down, Moses, he included her and her family on the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family tree, so although the novel's discussion of this "aunt" is exactly the same as the story's, we have a separate entry for her as a Beaucham in the database.)