The story was originally published, in a slightly different form, as "That Evening Sun Go Down" in The American Mercury in March of the same year.
[1] "That Evening Sun" is a dark portrait of white Southerners' indifference to the crippling fears of one of their black employees, Nancy.
The story is narrated by Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and concerns the reactions of him and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, to an adult world that they do not fully understand.
The black washerwoman, Nancy Mannigoe, fears that her common-law husband Jesus is seeking to murder her because she is pregnant with a white man's child.
Nancy is an African-American washerwoman working for Quentin's family since their regular cook, Dilsey, is taken sick.
At first Nancy is only worried about going home at night and running into Jesus, but later she is paralyzed with the fear that he will kill her, having delusions of him being hidden in a ditch outside her house.
Though the song is never explicitly referenced in the text, Faulkner employs a number of blues tropes to structure the plot and develop racial stereotypes.
Faulkner responded to a question about the story and the novel in Charlottesville by saying Nancy was “the same person, actually” in both texts, though he qualified his comment by adding, “These people I figure belong to me and I have the right to move them about in time when I need them” (FU79).