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The narrator relays the story Emily Grierson, an eccentric old woman that the townspeople regard as an object of pity and gossip. The story begins with her death at the age of seventy-four, and the narrator explains that everyone in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi attended the funeral in her home—some out of respect for the old woman (referred to as a “fallen monument”), and some out of curiosity, given that no one but her Black servant, Tobe, who did the cooking and the gardening for her, had entered the home in over a decade.
In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emily’s house was the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Over time, the neighborhood had lost its luster, giving way to encroaching garages and cotton gins, and Emily’s house, the last one standing, had begun to decay. Like the neighborhood’s previous inhabitants, who had all been put to rest in the cemetery where anonymous Union and Confederate soldiers were buried after the Civil War, Emily, too, is now dead and buried.
When she was alive, Emily had been something of an institution in Jefferson. She was a “hereditary obligation” they had received in 1894, when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities following her father’s death. Colonel Sartoris—who, we learn in a narrative aside, once introduced an edict forcing Black women to always wear aprons in public—had invented an excuse in order to persuade Emily to accept this generosity, because she was a proud woman and would never have accepted charity outright. Colonel Sartoris claimed that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum, and that remitting Emily of the burden of taxes from the date of her father’s death onward, “in perpetuity,” was the town’s way of repaying him.
As new town leaders took over, they made unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments, sending her a tax notice she didn’t respond to and writing letters that went unanswered. The current mayor extended his help, offering to send a car to bring her to the sheriff’s office; Emily merely sent a note with the tax notice attached, explaining she didn’t leave the house anymore. When members of the Board of Aldermen paid her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor over which a crayon drawing of her father presided on an easel in front of the fireplace, Emily had waited while they presented their case. She then reasserted the fact that she was not required to pay taxes in Jefferson. She told the officials they should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he had been dead for almost ten years. Emily, considering the matter closed, asked Tobe to show the men out.
