Colonel Sartoris also represented the Old South, and he protected Emily when her father died. As mayor of Jefferson at the time, he remitted her taxes, and since no aristocratic woman such as Miss Emily could possibly lower herself to accept charity, came up with a story of how her father had loaned money to Jefferson and this was how Miss Emily was to be repaid. "Only a man of Colonel Satoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it" (par. 3). So when Miss Emily was later approached by members of the generation of the city authorities who wanted her taxes, she held onto the past and told them repeatedly to see Colonel Sartoris, even though he had been dead for almost ten years. Furthermore, when the city authorities asked her whether or not she received "a notice from the sheriff, signed by him," she remarks, "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff" (pars. 9, 10). Obviously, Miss Emily didn't accept that whoever was the new sheriff was really the sheriff. As far as she was concerned, the sheriff was still the same person it was several years ago.
We are shown not only the government of the Old South Jefferson, when it sided with Miss Emily, and the government of the New South Jefferson, when it was against Miss Emily, but we also catch a glimpse of Jefferson's government when it was still under transition. About two years after her father's death, a smell developed around Miss Emily's house. The "member of the rising generation" on the Board of Alderman said that the solution to the problem was "'simple enough.Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her acertain time to do it in, and if she don't.'" At that point the remaining Old South revealed itself when the eighty-year-old mayor, Judge Stevens, irately asked, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" (par. 22, 23). It is apparent that though there were some old-timers left, just as Jefferson changed, so did its people.
