The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "That Will Be Fine," Grandma is married to Grandpa and is mother to Aunt Louisa, Sarah, and Uncle Rodney. She is Georgie's maternal grandmother, but Georgie pays little attention to her.

Sarah - Uncle Rodney's older sister, George's wife and woman whom the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls "mamma" (265) - is greatly upset by Rodney's behavior, mostly because gossip about it would damage "the family's good name" (267). She is very class-conscious, but also genuinely concerned about her younger brother: "mamma cried and said how Uncle Rodney was the baby and that must be why papa hated him" (268).

Georgie, the seven-year-old narrator of "That Will Be Fine," tells the essentially sordid and ultimately fatal story of his uncle Rodney from a perspective that emphasizes both the ignorance and self-centeredness of childhood. He never questions or recognizes Rodney's various forms of social and criminal misbehavior, and his loyalty to Rodney has its roots less in family love than in greed.

This is the youngest child of Uncle Fred and Aunt Louisa. Georgie's narrative in "That Will Be Fine" does provide either its name or its gender.

In "That Will Be Fine," the narrator's cousin Louisa is the young daughter of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

In "That Will Be Fine" this is the Fred who is the young son of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

In "That Will Be Fine," Aunt Louisa is married to Uncle Fred and mother to Louisa, Fred, and an unnamed baby. As Rodney's older sister, she repeatedly rationalizes her brother's behavior. She hides his misdoings from their father, and pleads for Mr. Pruitt to give him time to get the two thousand dollars he needs to cover his theft from the Compress Association.

In "That Will Be Fine," this is the Fred who is Georgie's uncle and Aunt Louisa's husband; he lives with his wife's parents in Mottstown. Fred is aware of Rodney's crimes but unable to do much about them.

In "That Will Be Fine," Emmeline is the nursemaid for Aunt Louisa's baby. She takes Mandy's place in cooking breakfast, complaining "that she was going to waste all her Christmas doing extra work they never had the sense she give them credit for and that this looked like to her it was a good house to be away from nohow" (279).

In "That Will Be Fine," after Mrs. Church pays a call on Mrs. Pruitt, she gossips about her with the women of Grandpa's family, saying that she uses too much makeup, does not dress properly, and drinks.