Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 21:50
The mother of Hoake McCarron, Alison comes from wealth as her deceased mother was the daughter of a "well-to-do" landowner (149). At nineteen, she eloped with Mr. McCarron a gambler with no definite past, climbing out of a second-story window to avoid her father.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 21:48
Hoake McCarron's father was a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 21:42
The station agent recalls seeing an unnamed drummer from Memphis "frightened and battered . . . in a pair of ruined ice cream pants" catch the early train south out of town (147-48).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 18:44
A "drummer" is a traveling salesman. This "drummer," described as a "youngish city man with city ways," sees Eula when he finds himself in Frenchman's Bend "by accident" and tries to court her, one time wearing "the first white flannel trousers Frenchman's Bend ever saw" (147). The same pair of "ice cream pants" are "ruined" after the local suitors drive him away (147).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 18:40
About a dozen young men from Frenchman's Bend "swarm like wasps" around Eula Varner after she reaches puberty (141). They help drive off the itinerant salesman who courts her briefly, and may be involved in the attack on Hoake McCarron, but as a group they can be distinguished from Hoake and the two local suitors who run away when Eula's pregnancy becomes known, having been displaced earlier in the competition.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-07-23 18:38
This is the "doctor or officer" - Labove, who witnesses the event, "does not know" which - who attends to a dying African-American who has been shot at on "a bleak station platform" at an unnamed location (138).
