The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Readers of The Sound and the Fury, published 17 months before "That Evening Sun," know that Jason Compson is the heir of one of Jefferson's founding families, which suffers financial hardship and general decline over the course of his lifetime. In this story he is still a young man, and he seems less fatalistic than in the earlier novel, or in Absalom, Absalom!, published five years after the story. He shows more concern for Nancy's situation than his wife does, and one senses that he would do more to help Nancy if it weren't for her.

Quentin and Caddy's brother Jason is five years old, the youngest of the white children in this story. He is also querulous, manipulative, and insensitive. When Dilsey is sick and the children go get Nancy to prepare their breakfast, Jason says, "I bet you're drunk . . . Father says you're drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?" (290). Later, he says that he will only stop crying if Dilsey makes him a chocolate cake.

Frony is the daughter of Dilsey and the sister of T.P. Dilsey mentions her when she invites Nancy to sleep in her cabin: "Frony will fix you a pallet" (298).

The other inmates of the county jail where Rider is being held are described in crude burlesque terms when the deputy sheriff tells his wife how he ordered them to try to restrain Rider in the jailhouse: he calls them "the chain-gang niggers" and describes them as "a big mass of nigger arms and heads and legs boiling around on the floor” (255).

Ketcham is an officer of the law who, despite his Dickensian name, works at the jail and deals with the men who have already been caught. He is at the jail trying to maintain order among the inmates when Rider is brought there.

Mayfield is repeatedly mentioned in connection with the votes required to keep him in office. (In the version of "Pantaloon in Black" that appears in Go Down, Moses, the sheriff's name is Maydew.)

She is described as "a stout woman, handsome once, graying now and with a neck definitely too short, who looked not harried at all but choleric" (252). She is impatient with her husband, the deputy sheriff, and preoccupied with her own concerns; her rapid movements between kitchen and dining room suggest her lack of interest in her husband's account of a black man's lynching.

This unnamed deputy recounts the second and last section of "Pantaloon," but much of the language used to characterize him serves to undermine his authority as a narrator. He is "spent" and "a little hysterical too" after both the manhunt for Rider and the lynching (252), and his wife shows no sympathy at all for him or for the story he's trying to tell her. Instead, she offers the narrative’s only portrait of the deputy sheriff: "You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long talking. It's no wonder two or three men can walk in and take prisoners out from under your noses.