The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

McAndrews is identified by the sheriff's deputy as "the white foreman" at the sawmill where Rider works (137).

The fireman who keeps the fire burning at the sawmill and who shares his breakfast with Rider is described as "an older man" (243, 136). The narrative from his perspective makes evident just how much of a sight Rider is after a night running through the woods.

These are the sexual partners who filled Rider’s life before he met Mannie: "the women bright and dark and for all purposes nameless he didn’t need to buy" (131).

This couple appears in the novel only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt.

Acey is a member of Rider's mill gang who is present at Mannie's funeral, and he offers comfort in the form of company and “a jug in de bushes” (130).

The African Americans who gather at Mannie's funeral are "the meager clump of [Rider's] kin and friends and a few old people who had known him and his dead wife both since they were born" as well as the men Rider works with at the mill (130).

This woman is a constant presence both in Rider's life and in the text: "She was his aunt. She had raised him. He could not remember his parents at all" (130). Several other characters, including her husband and members of Rider's mill gang, are referred to as her messengers, as she makes repeated efforts to rein in Rider's self-destructive bent by encouraging him to turn to family and to religion.

Rider is the head of a "gang" of sawmill workers who appear in solidarity at Mannie’s funeral (129). Several of them try to help him in his grief, and presumably several of them are among the Negroes who shoot dice after hours at the mill.

Mannie's sudden death (of unspecified causes) is the traumatic occasion for "Pantaloon in Black." She is described as having a "narrow back" and "narrow" hand (133). But despite her size, her husband Rider testifies to the strength of her character: "You’s de onliest least thing whut ever kep up wid me one day, leff alone for weeks" (133).

One of Faulkner's most memorable black characters, Rider is depicted from two very different perspectives in his chapter in the novel. Each perspective - that of a third-person narrator and then that of the white deputy sheriff who tells his wife about Rider in the tale's second section - describe him as powerful, even superhuman in his strength, "better than six feet and weighing better than two hundred pounds" (238). Rider is the only major black character in the novel who is not a descendant of Carothers McCaslin and Eunice.