The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

While Jason waits in his car outside the locked Mottson drug store, he watches passerbys and reflects on their perspectives about him: "Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life raveled out about him like a wornout sock, and went on" (313).

The man who saves Jason from the furious old man who attacks him is the man who owns the traveling show. He tells Jason he "runs a respectable show, with a respectable troupe," and has already fired the man Jason is looking for (312).

The old "man in a dirty apron" Jason spots at the train carrying the traveling show in Mottson is probably a cook. Though smaller than Jason, he becomes a "puny fury" when he feels Jason has insulted him, driving to get to his "butcher knife" and then attacking Jason with a "rusty hatchet" (309-10). As the owner of the show later tells Jason, warning him to stay away from the show, "That damn little wasp'll kill you" (312).

After Jason leaves the Sheriff's house, he stops at the gas station in town where this black attendant comments on the weather and fills Jason's tires with air.

The county Sheriff is a man with "vigorous untidy iron-gray hair and his gray eyes were round and shiny like a little boy's" (301-02). Jason goes to see him to report that his niece, Miss Quentin, robbed him. The sheriff handles Jason's anger in a measured manner, asking that Jason discuss the situation on the porch: "The sheriff watched him steadily with his cold shiny eyes" (303). He reminds Jason that he doesn't have proof and questions why Jason keeps so much money in the house.

Vernon is the husband of Myrtle, the Sheriff's daughter. He and Myrtle are in the Sheriff's house when Jason comes to report that he has been robbed.

Myrtle is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece.

The procession at the Negro church in Jefferson consists of "six small children: four girls with tight pigtails bound with small scraps of cloth like butterflies, and two boys with close napped heads" (292). At the start of the service on Easter Sunday, the children "entered and marched up the aisle, strung together in a harness of white ribbons and flowers" (292). Later they sing with the choir "in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers" (293).

He is the regular preacher at the Negro church in Jefferson. Though he does not give the Easter sermon, he enters the church with Reverend Shegog and is described in sharp contrast to the "undersized" visiting clergyman: he is "huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat. His head is magisterial and profound, his neck rolls above his collar in rich folds" (293).

The choir at the black church in Jefferson begin the Easter service with song.