Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2017-02-25 10:07
The last part of "Hair" marks the first appearance in Faulkner's fiction of Gavin Stevens. Over the next three decades he will re-appear in 16 more fictions, becoming perhaps Faulkner's favorite character. Here he is introduced as Yoknapatawpha's Harvard-educated "district attorney" (144), and the person who got the narrator his job as a traveling salesman. In return, the narrator has a lot of respect for Stevens, whom he describes as a "smart man" rather than a "usual pedagogue lawyer and office holder" (144).
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2017-02-25 10:01
Mitch Ewing is one of the narrator's sources of information about Hawkshaw. Because of his job at the railroad station, Ewing knows that Hawkshaw buys a ticket every year to a "junction-point," a station from which "he can go to Memphis or Birmingham or New Orleans" (143). (He may be the same character as the young man who drinks with Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust.)
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2017-02-25 09:42
Sophie Starnes is the daughter of landowners in Alabama. She is said to be a "thin, unhealthy" girl, with "straight hair not brown and not yellow" (139). Over her mother's objections, she becomes engaged to Henry Stribling - AKA Hawkshaw - the "son of a tenant farmer" (138). Before they can marry, however, Sophie dies of "some kind of fever" (138).
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2017-02-25 09:38
Mrs. Starnes, mother of Sophie Starnes, becomes widowed after Will Starnes dies. He leaves her with a mortgage on the house that Stribling (Hawkshaw) promises to pay off. Although the narrator refers the Starnes as "backwoods folks" (139), Mrs. Starnes believes her family's status is nonetheless superior to Stribling's (she calls him "one of these parveynoos" [140], or parvenu). When she dies, Hawkshaw buys her headstone.
Elly tells her grandmother that Paul "went to" Harvard as part of her attempt to convince the disbelieving old woman that Paul is "not a negro" (218). When the grandmother says she "can understand Harvard" (218), she may simply mean it's a 'Yankee' school, but in fact historically Harvard began admitting black students, in small numbers at first, shortly after the Civil War.
The University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville. Elly tries to convince her racist grandmother - writing it out because of the old woman's deafness - that Paul de Montigny "is not a negro he went to Va. and Harvard" (218). The grandmother, already sure that Paul is black, doesn't believe her. But while he could have been both a Negro and a Harvard student, Elly is right that if he attended Virginia he couldn't have been clack: no African Americans were admitted to the University until several decades after the story takes place.
Elly tells her deaf grandmother that Paul is "From Louisiana!" (211). That may mean New Orleans, the one place in Louisiana that often figures in Faulkner's fiction, but that is not made clear in the story.
Memphis, Tennessee, is the nearest large city to Jefferson, and often appears in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. In this and other stories, many people in Jefferson regularly read "the Memphis papers" (213).
Elly's fiance, Philip, is a cashier in "the bank" (213). The story does not say which of the two banks in Jefferson is meant: the one founded by Bayard Sartoris, that plays a major role in Faulkner's novels about the Sartoris and the Snopes families, or the older Bank of Jefferson. Our assumption that Philip works in the older bank is a speculation.
The drugstore where Elly and Paul meet is "downtown" (212), and presumably (as in other Yoknapatawpha fictions in which the Jefferson drugstore figures) on the Square at the center of town. The "prescription counter" beside which they talk is "in the rear" of the store (212).
