The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Uncle Job is the elderly Negro janitor and factotum to Judge Dukinfield. According to county attorney Gavin Steven’s conjectures, Job is the panopticon of the courthouse, who supposedly sleeps but who supposedly lets nothing or no one slip by him.

Emma Dukinfield is Judge Dukinfield’s daughter. She herself doesn't appear in the story, but the "small, curiously chased brass box" (25) that she brings back from Europe as a present for him plays a crucial role in solving the Judge's murder.

Judge Dukinfield is “a widower of sixty and more, portly, white-headed, with an erect and dignified carriage which the Negroes called ‘rear-backted’” (12). The judge has a daughter named Emma. He has been a "Chancellor" for seventeen years (12). In Mississippi, Chancellor is another title for Judge in Chancery Court, the legal venue for settling disputes over wills, among other civil as opposed to criminal issues. The judge “believed that justice is fifty per cent legal knowledge and fifty per cent unhaste and confidence in himself and in God” (12).

This county functionary investigates Anselm Holland’s (Senior’s) despoliation of the Mardis Cemetery.

Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words.

Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15). Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, unsuccessfully mediates between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.

One of the twin sons of Anselm Holland, Anselm Junior seems to have inherited his father's violent misanthropy along with his name, although he "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). He is the first of the twins to break with their father, moving "back into the hills" of Yoknapatawpha (5). He is "a dark, silent, aquiline-faced man" whom "both neighbors and strangers let severely alone" (6).

Cornelia Holland is the daughter and only child of Mr. Mardis. She marries Anselm Holland (Senior). She bears him twin sons - Anselm (Junior) and Virginius - of whom the former "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). Her father's property is held in her name after his death. She dies of unspecified causes when her sons are still children, though the narrator and others believe "her life had been worn out by the crass violence of [her husband,] an underbred outlander" (4).

Anselm Holland (Senior) is what the people of Yoknapatawpha consider an "outlander" (4) - i.e. someone who was not only born outside the county, but who remains estranged from the community no matter how long he or she lives there. Of an unremittingly violent, misanthropic, and crass nature, he alienates his sons, desecrates the graves in the Mardis Cemetery, and allows his sons’ rightful inheritance of farm and house to go to ruin for spite.

At the end of the story, the narrator identifies himself as a member of the grand jury that hears Gavin Stevens's explanation of Anse Holland and Judge Dunkenfield's murders ("we, the jury," 27). Hence, although we don't know his name, because Mississippi juries at this time were exclusively white and male, we do know his race and sex. He is telling the story of how Gavin Stevens reconstructed the murder of Old Anse Holland from "six months" after it happened (4).