The Reckoning

Joel and Stella are Pete and Liza’s children. When their father is arrested, Joel and Stella are already breaking away from the family heritage represented by the Banning farm. Joel is contemplating law school, and Stella is studying journalism. Stella wants a life in New York, surrounded by excitement. The siblings’ emotional connection to the farm is limited to what it means for their ability to pay for their educations. They represent the New South, in contrast to the Old South embodied in Pete and Liza. As the likelihood of losing their heritage grows, they experience more complex feelings of loss, which are ultimately resolved when they learn the whole truth about their parents.

Joel is more troubled than his sister by the motives behind his father's actions. Stella is more focused on her future, while Joel finds himself to have a stronger sense of history and tradition than he had realized before. He needs to understand the past. His conflict between past and future shows in his frequent return home to consult Buford, the farm manager, about farm business. Buford can manage on his own, and Pete has told his children to stay away from Clanton, but Joel feels responsible for keeping up the family obligations.

In one sense, Pete’s tragic flaw “destroys” his children, robbing them of their heritage as represented by the family farm. In another sense, the loss of the farm sets them free from the irrationality that the farm also represents. They are free to discover and create themselves according to their own vision.

Pastor Bell has a weakness for pretty women—a failing that his wife, Jackie, has tried not to see. Jackie has been as sure as she could be that there was nothing between her husband and Liza. Nevertheless, her suspicion leaves doubt as to what Pete’s motive for murder might have been.

Like most characters, Bell is a morally ambiguous character. He dissuades Liza from accusing Jupe of rape, which would have resulted in Jupe’s murder, but he assisted her in getting an abortion, which was illegal, and in the strictest interpretation of his religious beliefs, would also have been seen as a murder. Balancing all the consequences of the pregnancy, he settled on the solution he thought to be the least of all possible evils. His death, like Pete’s, is a tragic arc—the result of a man trying to make the best possible choices in a corrupt society.

Florry is Pete’s older sister. She is a divorcee and thus looked down on by the townsfolk. They call her “bird lady,” and it is not a term of affection. Florry is the repository of family secrets. She is the bridge between Pete and the world outside prison, between Pete and his children, and eventually between the children and Liza. Both Pete and Liza ask her to take their secrets with her to the grave, but Florry's role is to connect people. Keeping secrets is what tears people apart.

By sharing Pete and Liza's story, she enables Joel and Stella to move on. On the other hand, she instructs Joel and Stella to keep that secret and take it to their graves—something Florry is unable to do herself. Joel is uncomfortable with Florry’s instruction. He doesn't want to be associated with the kind of secret-keeping that stained his parents.

When Pete first meets her, Liza is beautiful, vivacious, adventurous, and sexually uninhibited. She enjoys being a soldier’s wife and traveling the world with him, and she wants a big family as much as Pete does. She grieves deeply when she believes Pete to be dead, but she is still a young woman with a healthy sexual appetite, which leads her to initiate a relationship with Jupe, who is 10 to 15 years younger than herself and has always adored her. Believing herself to be infertile, she doesn’t take what contraceptive measures are available to her at the time.

Initially, the reader sees Liza as empathetic toward the field hands on the Banning land—most of whom are Black. She is appalled by their poverty and does everything she can to alleviate it. Liza's relationship with Jupe is unusual only in the fact that she is white and he is Black, and that relationships between races were prohibited at the time.

The corruption of Liza's character by the racism of her culture becomes evident when the reader learns that she was willing to effectively condemn Jupe to death to save herself. A child of mixed race being born would have resulted in Jupe’s being killed if he was identified as the father, even if Liza insisted the relationship was consensual. Second, even if Liza weren’t prosecuted for breaking laws against interracial relationships, she would have been driven out of town in disgrace. After Pete’s return, when she is forced to confess the abortion, she has a mental health crisis triggered by guilt and regret. Her downfall is yet another consequence of both the sexism and racism of her time.

Errol McLeish, being a lawyer, recognizes Jackie Bell's potential to acquire the entire Banning fortune in a civil suit. He has no particular interest in a widow with two small children, but her future prospect for wealth makes her extremely attractive. With the transfer of the Banning land to Jackie Bell (and by extension to her new husband), the symbol of the Old South is destroyed, along with whatever grace and honor it once had.

Whereas the land represents heritage and identity for the Banning family, Errol sees it only in terms of wealth and status. He looks forward to being a prosperous and influential landowner. Unlike the Bannings, who treated their farmhands as dependents, McLeish immediately begins taking advantage of them—lowering their wages and forcing them to pay rent—thus reducing their standard of living. McLeish is an upstart, a representative of everything that is worst about the new order.

Jackie Bell always suspected her husband of philandering, although she had been almost sure Pastor Bell was not involved with Liza Banning. Jackie never confronts her husband about his philandering. She never grows beyond her role as an object for men who treat her with disregard. As soon as she becomes involved with Errol McLeish, the author never enters her point of view again, focusing on McLeish as Jackie disappears into the background.