The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

“Miss Amelia had lived her life alone. Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still.”

Miss Amelia rejects gender conformity in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” by exercising her independence and pursuing ventures typically reserved for men. McCullers makes this apparent through descriptions of Miss Amelia, often demonstrating how she dresses in functional rather than decorative clothing and uses her time to pursue physical labor, like working at her still.

“He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees. His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders. He had a very large head, with deep-set blue eyes and a sharp little mouth. His face was soft and sassy—at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavender shadows beneath his eyes.”

McCullers uses imagery throughout her stories to amplify the setting and characters. She also draws connections between the identity and emotions of her characters and their physical appearance. Cousin Lymon’s frail frame, tired appearance, and poor health symbolize his need to depend on others. Meanwhile, his manipulative nature emerges in his “soft and sassy” face, foreshadowing his tendency to pit people against each other for his own entertainment.

“And within an hour the news had swept through the town. It was a fierce and sickly tale the town built up that day. In it were all the things which cause the heart to shiver—a hunchback, a midnight burial in the swamp […] all told in hushed voices and repeated with some fresh and weird detail.”

“The Ballad of the Sad Café” takes place in a small, rural Southern town where everyone knows each other. McCullers captures this by detailing how quickly stories are spread and skewed by the townspeople. This rumor mill also highlights the mundane nature of their lives; townspeople instill fantasy and spectacle into rumors to make them more exciting.