The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This icon represents the municipal officials who stop by Gavin Stevens' office while he absent canvassing the Square for donations to defray the costs of bringing Samuel Beauchamp back to Jefferson for burial. The narrator identifies them only as "officials from the city hall and justices of the peace and bailiffs" from various parts of Yoknapatawpha (263).

To help pay the costs of bringing Mollie's grandson's body back to Jefferson and giving him a small funeral, Gavin Stevens calls at the various offices and stores "about the square" and solicits funds from "merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor and dentist and lawyer" (263). Some give him the "dollars and half dollars" he asks for, and some don't (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 group of "idle white men and youths and small boys" who are there (265).

Described as "the Negro undertaker's men" (265), this group awaits Samuel Beauchamp's casket at the Jefferson train station and helps load the casket into the hearse.

According to Gavin Stevens, "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260). Although he doesn't say so explicitly, the rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Stevens is sure "they wouldn't" tell Mollie about her grandson's fate, even if they ever "hear about it" (260).

These advertisers - presumably local businessmen and professionals - appear only hypothetically in the story, when Mr. Wilmoth, the editor of the Jefferson paper, worries whether he'll lose "what few advertisers I have got" (262) for helping Stevens organize a funeral for a black man, Samuel Beauchamp.

The daughter of slaves who belonged to the Worsham family, Mollie Worsham grew up with Miss Worsham in Jefferson but moved to the McCaslin-Edmonds' plantation when she married "Luke Beauchamp" (261). Her name is spelled "Molly" in other Faulkner texts, where her husband is named "Lucas." She is described as "a little old Negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child" (257).

Gavin Stevens calls an undertaker in Joliet, Illinois, to arrange for Samuel Beauchamp's body to be sent back to Jefferson after the execution.

When he calls the Joliet prison warden and the Chicago district attorney, Gavin Stevens learns that Samuel Beauchamp was represented at his murder trial by a "good lawyer" (260).

Gavin Stevens calls the Chicago District Attorney to gather information on Samuel Beauchamp.