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Miss Eunice Habersham is introduced to the reader in chapter four when she decides she wants to help Charles dig up the grave of Vinson Gowrie for the sake of Lucas Beauchamp. The idea of a white woman standing up for a black man during this time period was quite frowned upon. Nevertheless, Miss Habersham knew she had to help free Lucas. Her reasoning for helping Charles all went back to Lucas’s deceased wife Molly Beauchamp. Miss Habersham and Molly were born within a few weeks of each other and were raised by the same woman even though they differed in skin color. The two women had “grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up in the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.” Along with helping Charles dig up the grave Miss Habersham later put herself into danger a second time by standing guard outside the prison to protect Lucas who wasn’t even inside the building anymore. The third improbable friendship in Intruder in the Dust was that of Charles Mallison and Aleck Sander. Much like Miss Habersham and Molly Beauchamp, the two boys were born a few months apart and were raised on the same property. Charles included Alec Sander in everything he did from hunting rabbits in chapter one to confiscating dead bodies in chapter four. Without Aleck Sander’s sense of sight the night he, Charles, and Miss Habersham went to dig up the grave, the three of them might have been
