Character Analysis
Gavin Stevens is a white district attorney with a fancy education, "Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard; Ph.D. Heidelberg" (7.2.1) and has aspirations of being a Bible scholar. He's been working for twenty-two years on a translation of the Old Testament back into classical Greek. He could be living in another world for how different his life is from that of the black people in the county.
At the request of Mollie Beauchamp, Stevens tracks down Molly's grandson Samuel, who's about to be executed. He pays most of the cost of bringing the body home to Molly, and goes around collecting money from the rest of the merchants in town. He makes all the arrangements for the funeral. Have a look, however, at how Stevens puts the money collection effort to the town merchants: "It's to bring a dead n***** home."
He's freaked out by the singing and chanting going on at Samuel's wake:
"I'd better go," Stevens said. He rose quickly [...] He went down the hall fast, almost running; he did not even know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space, breath." (7.2.72)
But then, at the end of the story, he reaches a new kind of understanding about Molly's situation. He thinks through what Molly has tried to do for Samuel, and decides:
"It doesn't matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn't stop it, and now that it's all over and done and finished, she doesn't care how he died. She just wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car." (7.2.92)
As a character, Stevens demonstrates the huge gap between black and white society in Yoknapatawpha County. Even with good intentions, he's totally outside the African American experience.