On Saturdays "every tenant and renter and freeholder white or black in the neighborhood" would find a reason to go to the crossroads store, "quite often to buy something" but also often just to visit with each other (18).
Chick recalls Ephriam, Paralee's father, "an old man, a widower," living in her cabin and walking the roads at night: "not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day" in a rocking chair (61). By consulting a white fortune-teller, Ephriam finds out where Maggie Mallison's lost ring can be found (69). And like Tomey's Turl in the short story "Was," he knows that it's "womens and children" who are best at getting uncommon things done (70).
Aleck Sander's mother has been a servant in the Stevens-Mallison household for a long time, perhaps her entire life. She lives in a cabin behind the white family's house; growing up, Chick spent "a good part" of his life in that cabin, eating the "whole meals" that Paralee cooked for him and her son "halfway between two meals at the house" (11-12). Like her employer, Maggie Mallison, she is protective about her child.
"A youngish active man" (20), the son of the proprietor of Fraser's crossroads store steps in to prevent a white man from attacking Lucas with a plow singletree.
The owner of the "crossroads store" (18) near the scene of Vinson Gowrie's murder apparently helps Constable Skipworth keep Lucas safe from harm until the sheriff can arrest him; that seems to be what Gavin means when he tells Lucas he was likely to come to grief "old Skipworth and Adam Fraser or not" (222).
After Molly Beauchamp dies, her daughter moves with her husband to Detroit. This makes them part of what social historians have called the Great Migration, the 20th century movement of six million African Americans from the South to the cities of the North and West.
After Molly Beauchamp's death, her daughter moves with her husband to Detroit, making these two Yoknapatawphans part of what social historians have called the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans from the South to the cities of the North and West.
The city of Detroit was a major manufacturing center during most of the 20th century, making it a magnet for many of the African-Americans who moved from the South to northern cities - like Lucas Beauchamp's daughter and her husband - during the Great Migration.
When Chick meets her in her cabin, he sees "a tiny almost doll-sized woman much darker" than her husband Lucas; in person she is wearing "an immaculate white cloth on her head," the headrag that is the cultural badge of black women in Yoknapatawpha and that is missing in the photograph of her with her husband that disorients Chick when he sees it a bit later (10). Four years later Chick learns that she has died.
Identified in this novel as "Edmonds' father" and Lucas Beauchamp's "first cousin," this descendant of the original Carothers McCaslin gave Lucas "and his heirs in perpetuity the house and ten acres of land" he owns in the middle of the Edmonds' property (8).
