Unnamed Train Passengers 8

When in The Mansion Mink watches people getting off and on the train at the Jefferson station, he thinks of them as "rich men and women"; when he thinks of the people on the train itself, he thinks of them as "the other rich ones" (38). They certainly have more money than Mink, but are probably mostly middle-class; under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white. (Near he end of the novel he remembers these people forty years later, 445.)