To inform passengers on the train back from Memphis about the exploits of Lion and Old Ben, the drunken Boon Hogganbeck "buttonholes" them, and these passengers did not "dare to act as if they did not want to listen" (188). (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)
In the Memphis restaurant where Boon Hogganbeck and Quentin eat dinner, "all the other customers" have to listen to the drunken Boon's stories of Lion and Old Ben (188).
The waitress at the counter in the Memphis station tells Boon "he couldn't drink [whiskey] there" (188). When this episode recurs in Go Down, Moses, the waitress is replaced by a "negro waiter," and it's a woman "manager" who speaks the line originally given to the waitress (222).
When the train to Memphis arrives in Hoke's, Boon Hogganbeck buys "three packages of molasses-covered popcorn and a bottle of soda pop from the news butch" (188). "Butch" is short for "butcher," a term that used to be used to refer to men or boys who sold newspapers, sweets and other goods that would appeal to passengers on a train.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2016-11-17 09:23
According to the twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" Mister Ernest "wasn't jest a planter; he was a farmer" too - which means he worked on his land along with "his hands and tenants" (308). He raises "cotton and oats and beans and hay" (309) at Van Dorn, his estate somewhere close to the wilderness in which the hunt takes place. A widower, he adopts the unnamed narrator when the child's parents - tenant farmers on his land - abandon him. Mister Ernest goes deer hunting each November with a party of men from Yoknapatawpha.
Theophilus McCaslin is the grandson of Uncle Ike McCaslin, and a member of the hunting party. (This character never appears in any other story, but later Faulkner uses the name "Theophilus McCaslin" for Ike's father. Those later texts also say that Ike never has any children.)
