Unnamed Members of Jehovah's Shareholders

Character Key Number: 
3527
Display Name: 
Unnamed Members of Jehovah's Shareholders
Sort Name: 
Unnamed Members of Jehovah's Shareholders
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
No
Biography: 

In The Mansion, "Jehovah's Shareholders" is the name of a religious sect inside Parchman's Penitentiary (111). According to the novel's narrator, it was "headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness" (111). Again according to the narrator, it is typical of "the small violent irreconcilable non-conformist non-everything and -everybody else" unofficial religious groups that could be found "in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries" (111).