The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The signature of this "nameless clerk" appears on the marriage license for George Wilkins and Nat Beauchamp (70).

Outside the courthouse when George Wilkins and Lucas Beauchamp arrive for their trial are these "rich white lawyers and judges and marshals" (69). The narrative contrasts them, "the haught and powerful of the earth," with the black people who are also on the "thronged pavement" (69-70).

Outside the courthouse when Lucas, George and Nat arrive for the trial they see a group of people with "faces they knew" - other tenants from the Edmonds' place, and from "other places along the creek and in the neighborhood" (69). Since the text contrasts them explicitly with the "rich white" people also in the Square, it's likely that the people in this first group are all black.

Judge Gowan tries the moonshining case against George Wilkins and Lucas Beauchamp. Lucas has known him from "old Cass' time forty or fifty years ago," when the judge stayed at the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation "during the quail season" (71).

This "aunt" (68) in Vicksburg whom Nat visits is only mentioned once, when Nat tells Roth Edmonds about her trip. Later in the novel, in the "Delta Autumn" chapter, another young member of the Beauchamp family has an aunt in Vicksburg too (343), but based on the rest of the novel, it's hard to know how this aunt (or that one) is related to either of Nat's parents, Molly or Lucas.

This is the deputy who goes with the sheriff to look for a still on the Edmonds' place; he is "a plump man though nowhere as big as the sheriff," and "voluble" (62). Readers learn that his name is "Tom" when he commissioner calls him by that name as he testifies to what happened during the arraignment the next day (64). His volubility reveals his presumption that as a white man his mind is superior to a black man's.

The commissioner hears the case against Lucas Beauchamp and George Wilkins as moonshiners.

Lucas remembers the behavior and methods that sheriff's deputies use when they raid moonshiners.

Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledger as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child.

When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the novel's only reference to Thisbe, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household. A "sugar-tit" is a piece of cloth wrapped around sugar, honey or milk; it was a 19th-century way to feed an infant when a mother's breast or, in this case, a wet-nurse's breast is unavailable.