The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Though they "had never heard of Lion and didn't want to," these customers in the Memphis restaurant can't not hear Boon talking the dog and the bear he's going to hunt (222).

The waiter works in the Memphis restaurant where Ike and Boon stop before returning to the hunting camp.

The novel notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222).

This “man in a uniform cap” approaches Boon in the washroom at the station in Memphis to tell him he "couldn't drink there," but after one look "at Boon's face" he decides to say nothing (222). The cap suggests he's a porter, in which case he'd be a Negro, but that isn't made explicit.

According to "the tale told," this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221).

Historically, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave dealer before the Civil War, one of the Confederacy's most successful cavalry officers during the War, and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In this novel, several Faulkner characters serve under Forrest's command.

Colonel John Sartoris, one of the major figures in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, is mentioned only briefly in this novel. After having lost command of the regiment of Mississippi men that he and Sutpen put together early in the Civil War, returned to Mississippi, gathered together another unit and joined Forrest’s cavalry.

The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221).

Hoke is presumably the owner of the sawmill and commissary where the log-train stops to take Boon and Ike to and from Memphis.

The news butch works the train from Hoke's to Memphis, walking the aisles and selling things like magazines and candy to the passengers. Boon buys "three packages of popcorn-and-molasses and a bottle of beer" from him (218). The "beer" suggests they've crossed the state line into Tennessee; "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.