Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-07-24 21:47
I.O. Snopes has a six-month-old child even though he has been living in the hamlet as "a single man" for three years (225). When he sees this child and its mother, I.O. vanishes before the baby's sex can be determined. (In the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy he is a son named Montgomery Ward Snopes.)
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-07-24 21:38
The men who stay at the Savoy Hotel where Mink's wife works are described as horse-traders, jurors and insurance agents who sell to Negroes, a clientele that justifies the place's "equivocal reputation" (288). It is also rumored that some of these men pay her for sex, but that's not made explicit.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-07-24 13:09
The narrator refers to the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-07-24 13:03
The "county courthouse in Jefferson" sits in the middle of town (367). The courthouse and the Square around it comprise one of the central locations in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story about the "hamlet" arrives there in the near the end of the novel, when Mink Snopes goes on trial for murder.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-07-24 12:59
The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).