Summary: Chapter 9
After a time, McEachern notices that Joe’s suit has been
worn and realizes that his son is sneaking out at night. One night,
he watches as Joe slithers down the rope outside his window and
is picked up by a car. Hitching his team, McEachern is guided almost
instinctively to the schoolhouse, where a dance is being held. He
bursts in on the scene, calling Bobbie a harlot, and begins beating
his son, who smashes a chair over his father’s head, killing him.
Joe rides his father’s horse back to the house, where
he takes all the money his mother had been saving, hidden in a tin
beneath a floor plank. Eventually abandoning the fatigued horse,
Joe runs to Max and Mame’s house, where Bobbie is packed and ready
to return to Memphis. Another man, a stranger, is present as well.
The men ask Joe whether he thinks he has actually killed his foster
father. Bobbie curses him for getting her into a potentially compromising situation
and threatening Max and Mame’s prostitution business. Joe takes
his mother’s money out and gives it to Bobbie as his proposal of
marriage. She throws the offering back at him and calls him a “nigger
son of a bitch.” The men set on him, beating him until Mame finally
stops them.
Summary: Chapter 10
As Joe lies semiconscious on the floor, the group moves
about him, discussing whether they should take the money that he
tried to give Bobbie. Mame puts some of her own money in Joe’s pocket,
and the group pulls off in the car, leaving him behind. Badly beaten,
Joe eventually regains full consciousness and manages to get out
onto the street and out of town.
For the next fifteen years, Joe wanders, hitching rides
and working in oil towns and wheat fields as a laborer, miner, and
prospector. Finally, he enlists in the army and then deserts. He
patronizes prostitutes, eventually making a habit of telling them
afterward of his black ancestry in an attempt not to pay. For a
short time, he settles down among blacks and lives with a dark-skinned
woman for a while. Eventually his wanderings bring him to Jefferson,
where he presses a local boy for details about Miss Burden’s property.
Waiting until nightfall, he slips into the kitchen through an open
window and, famished, eats some leftover field peas. When he hears
Miss Burden approach, he does not flee. When she appears, she tells
him calmly that he is free to finish his meal.
Summary: Chapter 11
Though they are lovers, Joe and Miss Burden have a strange
and distant relationship. They talk little. She leaves food on the
kitchen table for him but rarely visits him when he comes in to
eat. During the day, Joe never ventures beyond the kitchen, though
at night he sneaks up to Miss Burden’s bedroom, where she waits
for him. Joe, however, is repulsed and threatened by her strength,
fortitude, and independence, which he views as overly masculine
qualities. When she sets out a full meal for him, Joe enters the
house and smashes the dishes against the wall, as he did with his
foster mother.
After getting a job at the mill, Joe continues to live
in the cabin but neither enters the main house nor sees Miss Burden
for months. One September evening, he returns to the cabin to find
her seated on his cot. She tells him her life story, going on for
hours. She tells of the various generations buried on the property,
including her grandfather and brother, who were killed by a local
man, Colonel Sartoris, over a disagreement concerning black voting
rites. When Miss Burden finishes and it is Joe’s turn to speak,
all he is able to reveal is that one of his anonymous parents was
part black.
