The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

An old man with a "long white beard" (379) and a "reedy, quavering voice" (380), he has "no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone" (380). He wears "a filthy frock coat" over a "tall thin" body and lives in a "mud-daubed hut in the river bottom five or six miles from any road." He makes his living selling "nostrums and charms" out by the river. Ratliff and Bookwright believe he can divine buried treasure. When he joins Ratliff, Armstid, and Bookwright at the Old Frenchman's Place, he also divines that there are "four sets of blood here lusting for trash" (384).

Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

The narrative speculates that "thirty years ago," the people at the Old Frenchman's place learned "the news of Sumter" - that the Civil War had begun - from a "courier" who might have been "a neighbor's slave," riding up to the plantation on a mule that had been "taken out of the plow" (373).

These "three bailiffs" who work in the courthouse have to help the two officers restrain Mink Snopes after his conviction (369).

The Judge maintains order during Mink's trial.

The jurors at Mink Snopes' murder trial are described as a "grave" and impassive "conclave of grown men" (368). It takes them only twenty minutes to reach a verdict. (Only white males served on juries in Mississippi at the time of the story.)

The lawyer appointed to Mink by the court is a young man recently graduated from the state university. He "did what he could" to defend Mink: "talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity . . . of listening to prattle of a licensed child" (368).

These women - Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" - help Henry Armstid's wife with her weaving by saving up "string and such" and giving it to her (360).

The Justice of the Peace overseeing the trials Armstid vs. Snopes and Tull vs. Snopes is a "neat, small, plump old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers who ever breathed" (357). With "neat, faintly curling white hair," he wears "steel-framed spectacles" overtop of "lens-distorted and irisless" eyes (357-8). His "immaculate" (359) appearance similarly gives way to the infirmities of age as when he falls into "an old man's light sleep" (362) during the trial and repeatedly attempts to hide or quiet his hands, which "tremble with an old man's palsy" (366).

These are the "spectators" who show up to watch the legal proceedings that result from the "Texas Sickness" - the auction of the wild ponies and its aftermath. They are described as "the men, the women, the children, sober, attentive, and neat, not in their Sunday clothes to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that morning" (356).