"Drummers," as traveling salesmen were called, appear three times in the novel sitting in chairs or standing or getting into a "bus" along the curb outside the hotel in Jefferson, first when Horace gets a room for Ruby, again the morning after he speaks with Temple, and then again when he waits in the hotel for a train to take him back to Kinston (124).
Although the narrative refers to them at one point as "the garage men" (127), the "white men sitting in titled chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street" from the jail during the day are associated with only two activities: listening to the convicted murderer sing and chewing, presumably tobacco (115).
This is a difficult group to label. It represents the "one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes" who "sometimes" visit the convicted murderer and on some of those times bring him "baskets," presumably containing food (115).
This icon represents the Negroes who gather outside the jail in the evenings and sing with the man inside awaiting execution. They wear "natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls" (114), and have "work-thickened shoulders" (124).
This is the "wife" of the convicted murderer who is in the jail when Goodwin is arrested (114). While it never gives her a name, or explains why her husband killed her, the narrative does provide a very vivid description of her death.
The narrative does not name this man, except as the "murderer" (114) who is awaiting his execution in the jail when Goodwin is locked up there. He killed his wife with a razor. According to another unnamed black character, he is the "bes ba'ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!" His constant singing of "spirituals" and blues songs in jail, accompanied by a "chorus" of other blacks outside the window, provides a kind of soundtrack for the novel's main narrative (114-15).
While the "cabin" in which the "negro murderer" lived with the wife whom he killed could be in several different parts of Yoknapatawpha, we chose to locate it in the section of Jefferson where Faulkner often locates black homes (114).
While the "cabin" in which the "negro murderer" lived with the wife whom he killed in Sanctuary could be in several different parts of Yoknapatawpha, we chose to locate it in the section of Jefferson where Faulkner often locates black homes (114).
Simply called "the coroner," this man may also be the undertaker, but all one can say for certain is that he "sits over" Tommy's body as it lays in the funeral parlor trying unsuccessfully to learn the corpse's last name (113).
The group that visits the undertaker's parlor to get a glimpse of Tommy's body consists of boys "with and without schoolbooks" who press against the window and the "bolder" young men of the town who go inside the building, "in twos and threes," for a closer look (112).
