Unnamed People of Yoknapatawpha

This icon represents the various inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha who are seen in town at various points during the narrative. When Narcissa Benbow, for example, drives her brother in the mid-afternoon from the train station through the Square to the tree-lined street where they live, the narrative describes the scenes from Horace's perspective, returning to Jefferson after being at the war in France. The opening pages of Part Three provide a fairly detailed inventory of the various generational and class and racial groupings into which the population is organized, at least by Faulkner's imagination: "dawdling negro boys," "old men bound townward," "drifting negroes," "country people," "urbanites," "men in titled chairs before certain stores," still older men wearing their Confederate uniforms "beneath the porticoes of the courthouse," "young men" pitching dollars, "young girls in their little colored dresses," more Negroes who "lounge" and more "countrymen in overalls" who "squat" (161-62). When Young Bayard parks on the Square at noontime, he sees "Negroes slow and aimless" and "country people." This latter group is broken up into "men in overalls or corduroy," "women in shapeless calico" with "snuff sticks," "young girls in stiff mail-order finery" and "youths and young men in cheap tasteless suits" (117-18). Working in the bank after hearing that Narcissa is marrying Bayard, Bryon bitterly notes the "passers" on the street who say hello to Old Bayard "with florid cheerful gestures" and the "depositors" who come into the bank: "people cheerful and happy with their orderly affairs" (269). When, later, Byron moves among them at night in the Square, they are made of mainly of "the group that sat nightly in front of the drug store" (273), the young couples courting by going to the movies and "more sedate groups" of men, women and children window shopping (274).