William Faulkner Light in August (1932)

They stand just without the door to the lighted room.

Hightower sees now that Byron’s arms are laden with bundles, parcels that look like they might contain groceries.

“What?” Hightower says. “What have you come to tell me?—But come in.

Maybe I do know what it is already.

But I want to see your face when you tell me.

I forewarn you too, Byron.” They enter the lighted room.

The bundles are groceries: he has bought and carried too many like them himself not to know. “Sit down,” he says.

“No,” Byron says. “I ain’t going to stay that long.” He stands, sober, contained, with that air compassionate still, but decisive without being assured, confident without being assertive: that air of a man about to do something which someone dear to him will not understand and approve, yet which he himself knows to be right just as he knows that the friend will never see it so.

He says: “You ain’t going to like it.

But there ain’t anything else to do.

I wish you could see it so.

But I reckon you can’t.

And I reckon that’s all there is to it.”

Across the desk, seated again, Hightower watches him gravely.

“What have you done, Byron?”

Byron speaks in that new voice: that voice brief, terse, each word definite of meaning, not fumbling.

“I took her out there this evening.

I had already fixed up the cabin, cleaned it good.

She is settled now.

She wanted it so.

It was the nearest thing to a home he ever had and ever will have, so I reckon she is entitled to use it, especially as the owner ain’t using it now.

Being detained elsewhere, you might say.

I know you ain’t going to like it.

You can name lots of reasons, good ones.

You’ll say it ain’t his cabin to give to her.

All right.

Maybe it ain’t.

But it ain’t any living man or woman in this country or state to say she can’t use it.

You’ll say that in her shape she ought to have a woman with her.

All right.

There is a nigger woman, one old enough to be sensible, that don’t live over two hundred yards away.

She can call to her without getting up from the chair or the bed.

You’ll say, but that ain’t a white woman.

And I’ll ask you what will she be getting from the white women in Jefferson about the time that baby is due, when here she ain’t been in Jefferson but a week and already she can’t talk to a woman ten minutes before that woman knows she ain’t married yet, and as long as that durn scoundrel stays above ground where she can hear of him now and then, she ain’t going to be married.

How much help will she be getting from the white ladies about that time?

They’ll see that she has a bed to lay on and walls to hide her from the street all right.

I don’t mean that.

And I reckon a man would be justified in saying she dont deserve no more than that, being as it wasn’t behind no walls that she got in the shape she is in.

But that baby never done the choosing.

And even if it had, I be durn if any poor little tyke, having to face what it will have to face in this world, deserves—deserves more than—better than—But I reckon you know what I mean.

I reckon you can even say it.”

Beyond the desk Hightower watches him while he talks in that level, restrained tone, not once at a loss for words until he came to something still too new and nebulous for him to more than feel. “And for the third reason.

A white woman out there alone.

You ain’t going to like that.