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The Grierson House is Built
-" It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street" (803).
-The Reconstruction Era: 1865-1877 -
The Before Time (Earlier Events)
-“old Lady Wyatt, her great aunt, had gone completely crazy at last” (806)
-"She had kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman" (808)
-How the town thought of Emily and her father: “a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (806). -
Emily's Father Dies
- Emily is in her 30's and single -“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days” (807). -Emily retreats into her house and is "sick"
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Homer Baron - The Good Times
-AFTER being sick for awhile, Emily emerges with "her hair ...cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows -- sort of tragic and serene" (807).
-"the Summer after her father's death, they began to work" on the town's sidewalks (807).
- "we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable" (807).
-"Poor Emily" (808) -
Homer Baron - The Town Tries to Intervene
-Emily's behavior with Homer is seen as disgraceful, and "the men [do] not want to interfere, but at last the ladies [force] the Baptist minister...to call upon her. He [will] never divulge what happened...[and] he [refuses] to go back again (809).
-The week after, the minister's wife writes to Emily's cousins (809) -
Cousins In Town / Buying Poison
-Two female cousins are in town visiting Emily
-Emily orders "a man's toilet set" and "a complete set of men's clothing, including a nightshirt" (809).
-The sidewalks are finished, and Homer leaves town.
-"'I want some poison,' she said to the druggist...'I want arsenic'" (808). The druggist asks what it is for as the law requires, but Emily won't say. -
Homer Disappears
-The cousins leave town, and "within three days Homer Baron [is] back in town" (810).
-Homer Barron was seen going in through the kitchen door "and that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time" (810). -
The Smell
-Emily hardly leaves the house for almost six months.
-Some ladies stop by, "but were not received," and the only person seen is Tobe "going in and out with a market basket" (805).
-Town's folk complain of a terrible smell coming from the house. Rather than tell her, "Four men...slunk about the house...while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack," and "they broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there" (806). Emily watched them from the window. -
Homer Baron - Aftermath
-Emily emerged on the streets, and she had "grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer" (810). -
Opens Her Door for China Painting Lessons
-Emily is around 40 years old
- Colonel Sartoris remits Emily's taxes "dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity" (804)
-"She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and grand-daughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent" (810). -
Emily Closes Her Door Again
-"The painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her" (810).
-Colonel Sartoris dies around this time
-LATER, "when the town got free postal delivery Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it" (811).
-LATER, Emily stops going upstairs -
The Town Tries to get Emily to Pay Taxes
-Officials mail her notices at the start of the year, and only after the mayor sends her a letter does she respond.
-A deputation is sent to her house to explain that she needs to pay her taxes, but she explains that she has "no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to [her]" (805). She then has Tobe show them out. -
Emily Dies
-Emily dies at age 74. She is bloated and obese. Her hair is a "vigorous iron gray" (810).
-The "whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house" (803).
-"She died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows...She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed" (811) -
The End
-"They held the funeral...with the whole town coming to look at Miss Emily...with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier...and the very old med -some in their brushed Confederate uniforms...talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs" (811).
-The town opens the room upstairs, and finds the man's clothes, the man's toilet set, and "The man himself [laying] in the bed" (812). On the pillow next to him is "a long strand of iron-gray hair" (812).