Fonsiba's Husband

Fonsiba’s husband looks and talks "like a white man," though he is a Negro "from the North," where he has lived "since a child" (261). He owns a farm in Arkansas, which he inherited from his father, who acquired it in return for his "military service" during the Civil War in what McCaslin calls "the Yankee army" but which he corrects to "the United States army" (261). He dresses carefully, in "ministerial" clothing, though the narrative calls attention to the emptiness of his pretensions - for example, he wears a "pair of gold-framed spectacles" to read, but "they did not even contain lenses" (265). He seems to live mainly off his father's pension. At least, when Ike traces Fonsiba to the Arkansas farm, he is dismayed to find it a "waste of unfenced fallow and wilderness jungle - no barn, no stable, not so much as a hencoop" (264).