The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

These inhabitants of the countryside around Jefferson don't appear directly in the novel, but they have left mark on the "wooden steps scuffed by the heavy bewildered boots" when they come into town to consult Ben Redmond in his law office (248); the fact that they are "bewildered" suggests their class status, and seems also intended to say something about Redmond's practice.

These men are originally depicted as the "row of feet" that Bayard sees propped on the porch railing when he arrives at Holston House to confront Redmond (245). Afterward, when Bayard leaves the hotel, this same group "raises their hats" out of respect for him (251).

When Bayard first rides into town on his way to confront Redmond, these "women" are the only people on the street, he assumes because it was "long past breakfast and not yet noon" (245). These (presumably) white women recognize Bayard and "stopped sudden and dead" when they realize his potentially fatal errand (245).

The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. They are already in the county by the 1830s, and still a presence there, though a very diminished one, in the 1940s. "General Compson" is best known to Faulkner's readers as the grandfather of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Sutpen's only friend in Absalom! (1936).

This is the group that Aunt Jenny refers to "us" and "we": her fellow Charlestonians during the War who, like herself, admired the efforts of the English blockade runner to break through the Union naval blockade, and so helped alleviate their sufferings during under the constrained wartime conditions, the time when "we had all forgot what money was, what you could do with it" (244).

Aunt Jenny tells Bayard about this "Englishman" among the blockade runners she knew in Charleston during the Civil War: "He must have been a gentleman once or associated with gentlemen" (244). For most of the Civil War the Union Navy blockaded the ports of the Confederate states, including Charleston, South Carolina. "Blockade runners" were sailors who snuck their ships past the Union ships to bring supplies to the South. This unnamed English seaman was presumably an officer. His smuggling, although motivated by money, made him a hero to Aunt Jenny and her peers.

Like Davy Crockett, John Sevier was a frontiersmen whose adventures made him a hero "to small boys or fool young women" (244).