The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Gavin Stevens is one of Faulkner's favorite characters, appearing in 16 different Yoknapatawpha fictions. He is descended from an old Yoknapatawpha family. He knows the larger world - "Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard; Ph.D., Heidelberg" (257) - but is deeply committed to his home, which he serves for years as the county attorney. The narrative is not being entirely ironic when it refers to Stevens as "the designated paladin of justice and truth" (266), as shown by his determination chivalrously to treat and serve both the black woman Mollie Beauchamp and the white lady Miss Worsham.

The Jefferson undertaker who buries the black citizens of Yoknapatawpha is himself a Negro. It was typical practice throughout the Jim Crow South at the time of the story to segregate funeral parlors as well as cemeteries. The "Negro undertaker" himself does not appear in the story (265).

The crowd that watches as the coffin carrying Samuel Beauchamp is taken off the train contains a "number of Negroes and whites both" (265). This icon represents the "probably half a hundred Negroes, men and women too," who are there (265).

In "Centaur in Brass" an unnamed local butcher gives Tom-Tom one of last year's watermelons that has been in cold storage for a year; he is afraid to eat it himself. In giving it to a black man, he joins other white folks in Faulkner's fiction who give black people castoffs with no regard for what happens next.

Although the narrator of "Centaur in Brass" says "we" often saw Mrs. Snopes working in her husband's restaurant, he later suggests that most of the customers there were men from the surrounding countryside. Major Hoxey eats there, but he looks out of place "among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces" of the other diners (151).

These three "erstwhile suitors" disappear from the county on the same day that "the young girl" they were courting weds Flem Snopes (149). In other fictions it is the report that she is pregnant that causes their exodus.

The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" remains unnamed. (When Faulkner develops the episode in The Town, Chick Mallison retells the story as he heard it from his cousin Gowan.) This narrator, like that of "A Rose for Emily," refers to himself in the first-person plural, "we believed," "our ears," etc. (149, 150, and serves as a kind of communal voice for "our town" (149); but he also occupies a privileged narrative position as one of four people who know what the water tower means to Flem Snopes, "that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all" (149).

Near the conclusion of "Centaur in Brass" Faulkner reveals that Flem Snopes lives in a bungalow on the bedraggled outskirts of town in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168).

Buck Conner is the city marshal in "Centaur in Brass." He seems to be a practical man with a reputation for common sense; as Flem says, "Buck Conner'll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib" (159).

In "Centaur in Brass" when the two unnamed auditors discover that that brass is missing from the municipal power plant during a routine audit, they return the next day with the "city clerk" (157). He seems to serve as backup for the auditors, who "hemmed and hawed a right smart, being sorry" to imply that something is financially irregular at the plant (157).