Requiem for a Nun

Scene One

Courtroom. 5:30 P.m. November thirteenth.

The curtain is down. As the lights begin to go up:

MAN'S VOICE

(behind the curtain) Let the prisoner stand.

The curtain rises, symbolising the rising of the prisoner in the dock, and

revealing a section of the courtroom. It does not occupy the whole stage,

but only the upper left half, leaving the other half and the bottom of the

stage in darkness, so that the visible scene is not only spotlighted but

elevated slightly too, a further symbolism which will be clearer when Act

Il opens-the symbolism of the elevated tribunal of justice of which this,

a county court, is only the intermediate, not the highest, stage.

This is a section of the court-the bar, the judge, officers, the opposing

lawyer, the jury. The defense lawyer is Gavin Stevens, about fifty. He

looks more like a poet than a lawyer and actually is: a bachelor,

descendant of one of the pioneer Yoknapatawpha County families, Harvard

and Heidelberg educated, and returned to his native soil to be a sort of

bucolic Cincinnatus, champion not so much of truth as of justice, or of

justice as he sees it, constantly involving himself, often for no pay,

in affairs of equity and passion and even crime too among his people,

white and Negro both, sometimes directly contrary to his office of County

Attorney which he has held for years, as is the present business.

The prisoner is standing. She is the only one standing in the room-a

Negress, quite black, about thirty-that is, she could be almost anything

between twenty and forty-with a calm impenetrable almost bemused face,

the tallest, highest there with all eyes on her but she herself not

looking at any of them, but looking out and up as though at some distant

corner of the room, as though she were alone in it. She is-or until

recently, two months ago to be exact-a domestic servant, nurse to two

white children, the second of whom, an infant, she smothered in its

cradle two months ago, for which act she is now on trial for her life.

But she has probably done many things else-chopped cotton, cooked for

working gangs-any sort of manual labor within her capacities, or rather,

limitations in time and availability, since her principal reputation in

the little Mississippi town where she was bom is that of a tramp-

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