The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Some of the hunters from Yoknapatawpha are named: Ike McCaslin, Willy Legate, Walter Ewell and Roth Edmonds. The reference to "Uncle Ike's standers" (300) - the men to whom McCaslin assigns a stand from which to shoot at the buck - suggests there may be several others in the group; however, the narrative does not provide any information about these men.

"Uncle Ike McCaslin" is not the narrator's uncle - nor anyone else's in any of the dozen other Yoknapatawtha fictions in which he appears, beginning with "A Bear Hunt" (1934). And unlike many characters in American literature referred to as "Uncle," Ike isn't black. In his case "Uncle" is a courtesy title, a mark of the other white men's respect for his knowledge of the woods.

Simon is one of black cooks for the white deer hunters. He also handles the hunting dogs while the white hunters pursue deer. (He is not Simon Strother, who appears in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished.)

A major character in the novel Go Down, Moses (1942), in this story Roth Edmonds is simply one of the hunters who have come from Yoknapatawpha. He is the only member of this group who brought a horse to hunt on, which indicates his higher social caste, and the few words he speaks to the narrator suggest he is as impatient with people he sees as inferior here as he was in the novel.

Walter Ewell appears in all of Faulkner's hunting stories, where he is usually identified as a very sure shot with his rifle. In this story, on the other hand, his main contribution is to be the first man to mention "school" in connection with the narrator (297).

Willy Legate is part of the yearly November deer hunting party from Yoknapatawpha. He is the first character in "Race at Morning" to call attention to the illiteracy of the narrator.

These unnamed game wardens are noted briefly, only once, by the unnamed narrator of "Race at Morning." They supervise the official start and ending of the deer hunting season in Mississippi. They are men who, presumably, enjoy hunting, fishing, and camping, and they are sworn to uphold state hunting regulations.

The twelve-year-old unnamed narrator is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296).