The central office telephone operator - hence called "Central" in The Mansion, at one time a familiar way of referring to telephone operators (413) - who connects Ratliff's long-distance call from Parchman to Gavin Stevens in Jefferson.
One of the three people in Alabama who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit in Sanctuary is "a telephone girl" (311). We learn nothing about her or her testimony, or whether she is sincerely mistaken.
This telephone operator is heard in Sanctuary as "a detached Delsarte-ish voice" that informs Horace his call to Miss Reba has ended (268). (Francois Delsarte was a Frenchman whose instructions for proper pronunciation became famous at the end of the 19th century.)
In Sanctuary Horace refers to the various young men who have been calling on his step-daughter Little Belle as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13). Horace seems to believe there have been many such suitors, "alert and a little impatient," sharing the hammock in the grape arbor with her in ways he finds very disconcerting (13-14), but Horace's ideas about Belle's sexuality are hardly reliable.
In Sanctuary, in order to try to find out where Narcissa went after he sees her in "disappear into a door" in town, Horace asks all the clerks "within the radius of where she must have turned" if they've seen her (261).
The "negro with a broom" in Sanctuary whom Gowan encounters when he wakes up in the Oxford train station is astonished at the young white man's disheveled appearance (35).
Sanctuary describes the people who watch Lee Goodwin's trial from Horace's perspective as he enters the courtroom. From this point of view they are a collection of "heads": "bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sun-baked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat" (281). The details suggest that the crowd is mostly male, but drawn from almost all the local social classes. There is, however, no suggestion that any of these people aren't white.
In Sanctuary the people who attend the "children's party" that the wealthy woman in Pensacola holds for Popeye are referred to simply as "guests," and not described at all (309).
The people who attend the "children's party" that the wealthy woman in Pensacola holds for Popeye are referred to simply as "guests," and not described at all (309).
