The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Maydew is the county sheriff. He sounds insensitive, not to say racist, when on the way to the jail he tells Rider, "You'll have plenty of fresh air when [the Birdsongs] get ahold of you" (150) - meaning, when they lynch him for killing a Birdsong. Yet he lets Rider's aunt come to the jail with them as a possible deterrent to the violence. The deputy sheriff in charge of the investigation of Rider's lynching often mentions Maydew's reliance on the votes required to keep him in office. (In the earlier magazine version of "Pantaloon in Black" the sheriff's name is Mayfield.)

The wife of the deputy sheriff who tells Rider's story in the last section of "Pantaloon in Black" is more concerned with what happened to her at a "rook-party" earlier in the day, when this woman - "another member" of the "club" that held the party - "insisted on a recount of the scores" and so cost the wife the "first, fifty-cent" prize she thought she'd won (147). ('Rook' was a popular card game in the early 20th century, played with a special deck of cards.)

She is described as "a stout woman, handsome once, graying now and with a neck definitely too short, who looked not harried at all but choleric" (147). She is impatient with her husband, the deputy sheriff, and preoccupied with her own concerns; her rapid movements between kitchen and dining room suggest her lack of interest in her husband's account of a black man's lynching.

This unnamed deputy re-tells Rider's story in the second section of the chapter "Pantaloon in Black," but much of the language used to characterize him serves to undermine his authority as a narrator. He is "spent" and "a little hysterical too" after both the manhunt for Rider and the lynching (252), and his wife shows no sympathy at all for him or for the story he's trying to tell her. Instead, she offers the narrative’s only portrait of the deputy sheriff: "You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long talking.

The novel does not narrate Rider's lynching. After his body is found "hanging from the bell-rope in a negro schoolhouse," the coroner officially says he was killed "at the hands of a person or persons unknown" (147). The deputy's narration, however, strongly implies that the lynchers are members of the Birdsong clan.

He appears only in passing, when he pronounces Rider’s cause of death and returns the body to Rider’s relatives.

Part of a large Yoknapatawpha family or clan, Birdsong is the white night watchman at the mill whom Rider kills. He has run a "crooked dice" game for fifteen years in which he cheats the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay (149).

These are six or seven men who work with Rider, three from his timber gang and three or four from the mill crew, who regularly shoot craps with the white night watchman's loaded dice in the tool-room at the back of the mill’s boiler shed.

He is described as "an unshaven white man" standing at the door of "a hut, a hovel" in the river swamp (140). He expresses concern about Rider's state of mind, and tries to "give" him a pint if Rider will give back the gallon he just bought for "four silver dollars" (140).

Alec is described as "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (138). He tries to get Rider to come back to his childhood home the day after Mannie's funeral. The narrative calls him Rider's "aunt's husband" (138); Rider calls him "Unc Alec" (143).