The narrative provides the "old" Kinston man who drives Horace home from the train with a fairly intricate story. "In the old days" he was at the head of local society, "a planter, a landholder, son of one of the first settlers." But when the town "boomed" into sudden prosperity, he lost his property "through greed and gullibility" and for the last several decades has made a living as a taxi driver. With his "gray moustache with waxed ends" and his "suit of grey striped with red," however, he still gives off an air of gentility (297-98).
The narrative doesn't say how it knows the young woman carrying an infant is a "countrywoman" (170), but it does sympathize with the fact that she is forced to stand while the college students on the train occupy the seats.
On the train to Oxford are "three middle-aged women" who cannot find seats, because of the "gay rudeness" of the college students who pushed into the car ahead of them (169).
On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). This one is unnamed, but together with "Shack" he outwits the train conductor and jokes crudely about women.
On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). One is unnamed, but he calls the other one "Shack," presumably a nickname derived from the confectionery near the college campus (169). "Shack" whistles a "broken dance rhythm" that the narrator calls "meaningless, vertiginous" (169-70).
Standing in the aisle of a "whites only" train car on his way to Oxford, Horace can see into "the jim crow car" coupled to it. What he sees are "hatted cannonballs [the heads of the black passengers] swaying in unison" amid the "gusts of talk and laughter" (168). (Under the South's Jim Crow laws, as the phrase is usually written, train passengers were racially segregated.)
On the "white only" cars of three trains that Horace takes during his journey to Oxford he sees a number of passengers. The terms used to describe them are either lurid or unpleasant. The sleeping ones lie with throats turned upward "as though waiting the stroke of knives." When some awake their "puffy faces" and "dead eyes" evoke "the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust." A crying child is said to be "wailing hopelessly." And the man beside whom Horace finds a seat immediately "leans forward and spits tobacco juice between his knees" (168).
