Unnamed Chain Gang

The specific chain gang that Mink works on while at Parchman's consists of eleven men altogether, who go to and from the "mess hall to eat" and the cotton field where they are forced to work "shackled to the same chain" (105). The three who are named - Mink himself, Stillwell and Barron - are all white, and they live inside the penitentiary in "a detached wire-and-canvas-and-plank hut," so it seems safe to assume that in the segregrated South, all eleven are white, but that is an assumption. The gang tries to kill Mink after he objects to their plan to escape.