Birdsong

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Birdsong is the white night-watchman at the mill whom Rider kills. For fifteen years he has run a crap game using "crooked dice" which allow him to cheat the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay. He is part of a large family clan; as the deputy sheriff says, "It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There’s forty-two active votes in that connection" (252, 148). Birdsong is repeatedly referred to in the narrative as "the white man" who carries a "heavy pistol in his hip pocket" (250-51, 145). His killing is briefly referred to by Temple Drake in Requiem for a Nun, where he is the "white man" whom the Negro widower kills "in a dice game" (156).