Unnamed Queen

This "queen" is the protagonist of the grim fairy tale that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). Like Nancy, she "has to cross a ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door," but is afraid of the "bad man" who is hiding in the ditch (303). The question of the racial identity of these characters is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black. This "queen" then is the only upper class Negro character in Faulkner's fiction.