In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the other men who frequent the tavern where Gant stays on his trips to Memphis are described as "rough, unshaven, overalled men" who "eat coarse food and drink pale, virulent corn whiskey and sleep in their muddy clothes and boots on the puncheon floor before the log fire" (368). Some of them, at least, are probably mule or horse traders like Gant - they arrive in "other caravans similar to his" - but others make their living in "more equivocal" but unspecified ways (368).
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the "oldish" man in "in the background" at the tavern where Gant stays is vividly described as a drunkard "with cunning reddish pig's eyes and matted hair which lent a kind of ferocity to the weak face which they concealed," but beyond that his place in the narrative remains vague (368). It's likely that he is Mrs. Vinson's husband or father, but all the text says about their relationship is that they are occasionally heard "cursing one another in the back" of the tavern (369).
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "neighbor" is awakened when Zilphia "runs out of the house in her nightdress, screaming" (380). She - although the neighbor could be a man or a woman - summons the doctor.
"Miss Zilphia Gant" leaves it up to its readers to decide for themselves about the identity of the girl that Zilphia brings back to Jefferson at the end, claiming that she is her own daughter. The cues provided by the text, however, make it probable that this girl (whom the narrator calls "little Zilphia," 381) is the daughter of the painter Zilphia married many years earlier and his second wife: for example, the girl has "eyes like wood ashes and dark hair," both traits she shares with that husband (381, 375).
Years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant in "Miss Zilphia Gant," Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). In many of these dreams she is "walking to and from school . . . with her daughter's hand in hers" (380).
In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this "a hulking halfwitted boy" helps Jim Gant in his work as a trader (368). It is he who tells Mrs. Gant that her husband has left her, when he tries to collect the $1.75 he loaned to Gant; when she refuses at gun point to give him any money, he becomes "an ancient mariner in faded overalls" as - "wild eyed and drooling a little at the mouth" - he relates his grievance repeatedly to the other people in the Bend (370).
When "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns that her former husband has married again "in a neighboring state," she travels to Memphis to engage a "private detective agency" to surveil him and his new wife. The story does not describe any of the individual detectives, but the agency sends her detailed accounts in weekly letters. (The history of American private detective agencies dates back to Allen Pinkerton, who started his National Detective Agency in 1850.)
This is the "daughter" who is born to the "girl whom [Zilphia] used to visit" when a teenager (374); the narrator of "Miss Zilphia Gant" notes that at least some of the dresses this child wears were made by Zilphia.
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "client of Mrs. Gant's" in the dressmaking shop arouses the dressmaker's wrath when she starts talking to the nine-year-old Zilphia about going to school: "You'll like it," she says, before being chased away by Mrs. Gant (372). It is presumably this woman who reports the situation to the county authorities - according to the townspeople, at least, it was "a client . . . that got Zilphia in school" (372).
"Miss Zilphia Gant" covers 40 years in the life of its title character. During that whole time the narrator and town continue to call her "Miss Zilphia," although she was married at least once. Physically, she is "pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes" for most of her life (372), but "plump in a flabby sort of way" at others (375), sickly "from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair" (372), and beset in her "ineradicable virginity" by insomnia and dreams (379).
