Unnamed Negro Cook 9

"The cook" at the Killegrews in "Shingles for the Lord" won't lend out any of Killegrew's tools (28). While neither the gender nor the race of "the cook" - as the published story refers to her twice (28) - is specified, all but one of the 'cooks' in Yoknapatawpha are women and all of them are black. (And in the typescript version of "Shingles" she is referred to, twice, as the "nigger cook." It would be interesting to know exactly how that ugly epithet came to be deleted; there is evidence that the editors of the national magazines that published Faulkner's short stories felt a lot more anxious about printing that word than Faulkner was. "Shingles" was published in The Saturday Evening Post.)