In ‘Dry September’, the past fuses with the present when Miss Minnie creates the suspicion

of being attacked by Will Mayes as she had done one year earlier about another man, the
past is not dead, it is not even past.

Behind this short story is a question to the reader; this is a story only about an unfair murder
guided by the racism, the prejudice and extremely violence? Why the narrator does not
gives us the real motivation of each character? Why after all this town seem the same and
nothing changes? Maybe he is trying to do the reader to stop for a while and think about the
possibility of a recognition, maybe the reader has a little identity with one of the characters
when, for example, we do little jokes about one Negro or we make a reference to a “good
Negro which I met yesterday” (if there are two kinds of black people: the bad ones and the
exception the good ones just like we do with a merchandise), but can not to say a word
when he is passing any kind of humiliation in a establishment. Probably this reader never
felt in this kind of behavior as an ingredient for a murder just because this reader never
organized a campaign to kill someone as McLendon but the little prejudice behavior can
include this reader among the Jefferson’s people which did not do nothing to save an
innocent.

Nobody said to Miss Minnie exactly what she represents or what she should do, but the
reader can perceive through the behavior of Jefferson’s people the prejudice against
unmarried woman, a prejudice disguised in false friendship and precaution of her honor,
interfering in her private life. The dryness of attitude in this town is killing the compassion
just as the rainless days are killing the life and this society is missing in the dust of
decadence, hypocrisy, racism, proud and prejudice. The reader can notice these felling
through the narrative or the dialogue among the character but also through the atmosphere
of a red colored day representing the pain, the hatred, the death, and the carnal desire.

When the town began to see her driving with the cashier in the bank (a high colored man)
they began to say: “Poor Minnie”, “But she is old enough to take care of herself”, here, as it
happens in ‘A Rose for Emily’, the public opinion appears and ‘protect’ these unmarried
woman perceived as pure, spotless, pristine. It is the same public opinion that relegated
Miss Minnie into adultery; and after this, the cashier was gone to a Memphis Bank, returning
only one day each year at Christmas, but never visiting her, them the same public opinion
told her about him, and by that hour they could feel the scent of whisky on her breath, “…
her idle and empty days had a quality of furious unreality” she begins to enter in the same
world of Miss Emily, it’s better to her to live in another reality than realize that “…men did
not even follow her with their eyes any more.”. She tries to wet her dry, lonely heart with
whisky, she prefers to live in her own world, and out of reality; who can say what a woman
like that can do?

But all this trouble began with a story about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro, but she is not
an ordinary woman, and we began to see this when one man in the barber shop makes a
comment: “This aint the first man scare she ever had…Wasn’t there something about a man
on the kitchen roof watching her undress, about a year ago?”.