The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

He appears only in passing, when he pronounces Rider's cause of death and returns the body to Rider's relatives.

The coroner makes an official pronouncement of Rider’s death "at the hands of a person or persons unknown" (252), though the deputy's narration strongly indicates that the lynchers are members of the Birdsong clan.

He is the white night-watchman at the mill and has run a crap game using "crooked dice" for fifteen years in which he cheats the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay. He is part of a large family clan; as the deputy sheriff says, "It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There’s forty-two active votes in that connection" (252). Birdsong is repeatedly referred to in the narrative as "the white man" who carries a "heavy pistol in his hip pocket" (250-51).

These are six or seven men who work with Rider, three from his timber gang and three or four from the mill crew, who are shooting craps with the white nightwatchman's dice in the tool-room at the back of the mill’s boiler shed (250).

He is described as "an unshaven white man" standing at the door of "a hut, a hovel" in the river swamp (140). He is repeatedly referred to as "the white man" during the exchange with Rider. He expresses concern about Rider's state of mind, and tries to "give" him a pint if Rider will give back the gallon he just bought for "four silver dollars" (140).

"Unc Alec" (249) - Rider's "aunt's husband" (245) - is described as "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (245). He tells Rider that his aunt wants him to come home.

Aunt Rachel never directly appears in the story. Quentin says she is "old," and lives in a cabin "by herself" near Nancy, smoking "a pipe in the door, all day long" (294). The "Aunt" in her name is clearly conventional, part of the way the Jim Crow culture stereotypes Negroes, but it's not clear whether she is "Jesus' mother": "Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn't any kin to Jesus" (294). Quentin's father suggests Nancy could "go to Aunt Rachel's" for safety, but that doesn't happen (306).

The jailer in the county jail cuts cuts Nancy down when she tries to hang herself in her cell - and then beats her.

Mr. Lovelady's daughter is mentioned in passing in "That Evening Sun." She is described as a "child, a little girl," who lives in the hotel with her father and mother (308). When her mother commits suicide, though, Lovelady "and the child went away" (308). He returns alone, and we learn nothing more about his child's fate.

For much of the story, McAndrews is identified as “the white foreman” at the sawmill where Rider works (244), and he is the first identified white character to appear in the story. Only in the deputy sheriff’s retelling of events is McAndrews referred to by name.