Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:09
One of the barber shop clients who debates whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:08
This is one of the barber shop clients in the story who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes. Unlike the "drummer" and the client who "had been a soldier" (172), he is not individualized in any particular way. Although he worries that the other men are talking too loudly, he goes along with them on the lynching.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:05
An out-of-towner, described as looking like "a desert rat in the moving pictures," who gets his shave and haircut from Hawkshaw and enthusiastically joins the lynch mob (170). ("Drummer" is another way to refer to a traveling salesman; it is no longer used but would have been very familiar to Faulkner's original audience.)
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 12:54
A decorated veteran of World War I and the leader of the lynch mob. He has a "heavy-set body" and an aggressive temperament (171). The story ends with McLendon returning to his "neat new house" (182), striking his wife, and retreating to their bedroom. (In the version of this story that appeared in Scribner's magazine, he is named John Plunkett.)
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 12:48
A Jefferson barber, described as "a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face" (169). His shop serves as the story's opening setting, and he serves as the point of view through which the story's racial violence is presented. Fearing for Will Mayes, whom he likes, yet unwilling to take an aggressive stand, Hawkshaw tags along with the lynch mob. He tries to talk the men out of doing anything until they learn more about what happened, but leaps out of McLendon's car before the lynching.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 12:41
"Dry September" begins in Hawkshaw's barber shop in Jefferson, where the male patrons are recruited by McLendon into a lynch mob. Later, Hawkshaw runs from his shop, "swiftly up the street," and through a "darkened square" (175). It is implied, therefore, that the shop is in or near the courthouse square.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 12:40
In the 11 texts where it appears, the town "barbershop" - Faulkner seems to have spelled this as one word, though in some stories it is printed as two, and in one it is hyphenated - is identified as a very masculine environment. It is where Quentin Compson finds Dalton Ames in The Sound and the Fury. It is also a place where men of different classes can mingle - it is where Horace Benbow runs into Clarence Snopes in Sanctuary - but more typically it is associated with the kind of men who can make no claim to respectability.
