The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Mrs. Cowan owns and runs the Jefferson boarding house where Hawkshaw and Mitch Ewing live. She never appears directly in the story, but Matt Fox says that she's the only woman Hawkshaw knows.

The narrator says Matt Fox, a barber at Maxey's barber shop, "knew more about Hawkshaw than Maxey" (133), which surprises the narrator because Matt does not talk much. Matt is also married and described as a "fat, flabby fellow, with a pasty face and eyes that looked tired or sad something" (133). He is "funny" and "almost as good a barber as Hawkshaw" (133).

Maxey owns the Jefferson barber shop in "Hair," and it is he who hires Hawkshaw. His brother-in-law, who lives in Porterfield, is also a barber. The unnamed narrator speculates that when Maxey visits Porterfield, he shaves his brother-in-law's customers, "like a sailor will spend his vacation in a rowboat on an artificial lake" (142). The narrator relies on Maxey for information about Hawkshaw and Susan Reed.

The Burchett's have "two or three more children" of their own, in addition to Susan Reed, the one they adopted (131).

Along with her husband, Mrs. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed. The unnamed narrator repeats the local rumor that Susan may be her illegitimate child, but this is never confirmed. Mrs. Burchett seems to be more involved with Susan's care than Mr. Burchett. However, she easily succumbs to Susan's deceptions. According to the narrator, Mrs. Burchett doesn't know that when Susan becomes a teenager, she stops going to school and forges the report cards that Mrs. Burchett signs.

Mr. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed. The story's narrator repeats the local rumors that Susan may be Mr. Burchett's illegitmate child, but this is never confirmed.

Although the narrator calls him Hawkshaw, the main character's real name is Henry Stribling. The narrator says that the first time he saw him, Hawkshaw looked "forty years old" and "a bachelor born" (137); at the end of the story it's thirteen years later, but Gavin Stevens says Hawkshaw is still "not much over forty-five" (147). He is the son of a tenant farmer and seems quiet, church-going, and focused on his barbering, a "little, sandy-complected man," with an unmemorable face, who often wears a "blue serge suit and a black bow tie" (137).

Susan Reed is an orphan who is taken care of by the Burchett family; possibly she is their niece or cousin, but the story's narrator hints that she may be the illegitimate child of either Mr. or Mrs. Burchett. We first encounter her as a "thin little girl," "about five" years old, with "big scared eyes," and "straight, soft hair, not blonde and not brunette" (131). Once she reaches adolescence, however, her innocent look disappears and she becomes promiscuous, with "flimsy off-color clothes" and a "face watchful and bold and discreet all at once" (135).

The narrator never gives us his name, but we do know he has a daughter and that he's from a town that's similar to the "North Mississippi and Alabama" (137) towns he visits as a salesman. After leaving his position as a bookkeeper for a bank, he took to the road selling a "line of work shirts and overalls" (137). He is curious about people, and what little he reveals about his opinions of their behavior suggests misogynistic thinking: "all women are born with the badness in them" (133).