Unnamed Members of Jehovah's Shareholders

"Jehovah's Shareholders" is the name of a religious sect in Parchman's Penitentiary (111). According to the 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). The specific crimes are "bigamy" and embezzlement for a woman, "his wife or someone else's," or occasionally "a professional prostitute" (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).