The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A major character elsewhere in Faulkner, he is mentioned in "Shall Not Perish" as the "real [major] in the old Confederate war" (107); his son is called "Major" by courtesy.

County resident and wife of bus driver Solon Quick. She pays for the ride with her "egg-money," that is, money she makes from selling the eggs that her chickens lay (111).

Solon Quick is a Yoknapatawpha farmer who also owns and operates the local school bus, which he "built" himself by adapting a truck (106). On Saturdays he uses it to give the people of Frenchman's Bend rides to and from Jefferson; his wife has to pay the same round-trip fare as everyone else - twenty-five cents.

Major de Spain's unnamed house servant is the story's only black character. Although Mrs. Grier twice asks de Spain "what is your Negro's name?," and after the second question the Major "calls the name," the narrator never tells us what it is (109). The narrator does, however, note "the whites of the monkey nigger's eyes" when he first opens the mansion's door (106), and that he moves "without making any more noise than a cat" when he takes away the pistol from the top of the coffin (109).

The narrator remarks "that any woman in Frenchman's Bend and I reckon in the rest of the county too could have described" De Spain's parlor (106).

The narrator speculates about "the men who would come to Major de Spain after bank-hours or on Sunday to ask to have a note extended" (106-107).

The narrator refers to Major de Spain as "an old man, too old you would have said to have had a son just twenty-three" (107). He was born after the Civil War, probably around 1870, and his title of "Major" is an honorary one, inherited from his father who held that rank in the Confederate Army. The narrator not only identifies him as "a banker powerful in money and politics both" (107), but knows that he meets with men asking for extensions on their loans in his big house.

The son of the Major de Spain who is himself the son of the 'real' Major de Spain. An aviator and officer who is killed fighting in the Pacific, he is the second World War II casualty from Yoknapatawpha County.

Homer is a Frenchman's Bend neighbor of the Griers, and like them a farmer. He gives Grier a ride to town in his cattle-truck.

After Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures.