The ditch between the Compson property and Nancy's cabin plays a major role in "That Evening Sun." When the Compson children are sent to fetch Nancy, it's as close as they go to Nancy's, "because father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus" (290) - a deliberately provocative phrase: the Jesus in the story is Nancy's disreputable boy friend, not the Christian savior. Later, after Jesus has left town, Nancy tells both Dilsey and Mr. Compson that she can nonetheless feel Jesus "laying yonder in the ditch," waiting to attack her (297).
The road down which the lynchers drive Will Mayes from the "highroad" to the abandoned brick-kiln in described in "Dry September" as "narrow" and "rutted with disuse" (179). The ditch beside it into which Hawkshaw jumps is filled with "dust-sheathed weeds" (179).
A day or two after Percy Grimm organizes members of the American Legion into a squad of peacekeepers, "the night marshal" joins them (456). He does not join their poker game, and so some of the veterans jokingly call him an "M.P." and give him the Bronx cheer they learned to make during the war (457).
Joe Christmas keeps the illegal whiskey he sells buried in a ditch in "a small valley in which a spring rose" in the woods beyond the Burden plantation pasture (110). The water flowing out of the spring is described as "ceaseless," but it's smooth enough to allow him to shave "using the water's surface for a glass" (111). The ditch is described as having "a smooth, sandblanched floor between steep shelving walls, choked, flank and crest, with brier and brush" (112).
In Light in August Joe Christmas keeps the illegal whiskey he sells buried in a ditch in "a small valley in which a spring rose" in the woods beyond the Burden plantation pasture (110). The water flowing out of the spring is described as "ceaseless," but it's smooth enough to allow him to shave "using the water's surface for a glass" (111). The ditch is described as having "a smooth, sandblanched floor between steep shelving walls, choked, flank and crest, with brier and brush" (112).
When McEachern tells him about "work," Joe understands what it means by remembering that "he had seen work going on in the person of men with rakes and shovels about the playground [of the Memphis orphanage] six days each week" (144). Based on the kind of work these men are doing, and the patterns of the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, it seems very likely that these men are black.
The novel never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this "character" to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black.
The narrator's vision of Doane's Mill in the future includes the "hookwormridden" people in that area who, without knowing anything about the hamlet, would pull down the mill buildings to "burn in cookstoves and winter grates" (5).
The novel never gives Reverend Hightower's mother a first name, much less a maiden one. But it does tell us that "she was one of many children of a genteel couple who had never got ahead and who seemed to find in the church some substitute for that which lacked upon the dinnertable" (472).
An intriguing figure. He appears after Deputy Buford and "two or three others" seize a black man as Sheriff Kennedy ordered (291). When Kennedy and Buford go into the cabin at the Burden place to interrogate the black man, this "third man" is there too (293). The interrogation consists mainly of Buford whipping the Negro until he tells Kennedy what he wanted to know: who had been living there before.
