The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"The fellow in the radio talking" - this is how the narrator refers to the announcer who reports on the bombing of Pearl Harbor (81).

The man Res refers to as "Our President in Washington, D.C." (85) is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S. President. Like Pete Grier (but unlike Res) Roosevelt's response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor - which he famously called "a date that will live in infamy" - was to declare war.

The narrator as well as his mother refer to the enemy who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84).

The "General MacArthur" who was "holding" the Japanese invaders at bay in the Philipines in the nightly radio reports that the narrator and Pete listen to (82) was General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Army Forces in the Far East when the U.S. entered World War II. After the Japanese invasion forced him to withdraw from the Philippines, he spoke the parting words - "I shall return" - that were becoming famous at the time "Two Soldiers" was written.

At the request of Mrs. McKellogg, a soldier driving "a big car" takes the Grier boy home from Memphis (99).

The narrator refers to the African American who brings food to the McKellogg apartment on "a kind of wheelbarrer" as "a nigger . . . in a short kind of shirttail coat" (98). With the exception of his reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the black employees of the apartment building provide the story's only mention of race.

When Mrs. McKellogg takes the narrator back to what he calls "her house" (obviously, an apartment house, 97), he notes that the "little room without nothing in it" (obviously an elevator) is operated by "a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had" (obviously the operator, 97). With the exception of his reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the African American employees of the apartment building provide the story's only (linguistically racist) mention of race.

At the McKellogg residence, the Grier boy meets Colonel McKellogg: "a old feller, with a britching strop, too, and a silver-colored bird on each shoulder" (98). The 'birds' are in fact actually made of silver, the insignia of his rank.

Mrs. McKellogg functions somewhat as the Memphis version of Mrs. Habersham, intervening on behalf of the Grier boy. The narrator notes that she is wearing "a fur coat, but she smelled all right" (97). She provides him with food and a ride back to Frenchman's Bend.

One of the soldiers the narrator encounters in the Memphis recruiting station is a lieutenant: "he had on a belt with a britching strop over one shoulder" (94). This leather band over the right shoulder is also called a "backing strop" by the boy (95); the story uses it to indicate an officer's rank.