Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of
hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when
Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro
woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her
taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into
perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel
Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had
loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business,
preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation
and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have
believed it.