When Minnie Cooper starts drinking in "Dry September," the "youth" who supplies her with whiskey is identified as "a clerk at the soda fountain" (175). (Selling liquor was illegal in Yoknapatawpha, except that doctors and drugstores could dispense it for medicinal purposes, which probably explains how this clerk has access to the alcohol.)
The boys and girls who are Minnie Cooper's "contemporaries" and "schoolmates" begin to ostracize her before they are finished with high school, apparently because her "people," while "comfortable," are "not the best" people (174). They grow up to date and marry each other and have their own families, leaving Minnie on the sidelines of the town's life.
In "Dry September" these "coatless drummers" sit in "chairs along the curb" outside the hotel and watch Minnie Cooper as she passes through the courthouse square with her friends (180). 'Drummer' was a well-known term for traveling salesman; these drummers are staying at the hotel while plying their trade in the town.
This man may exist, or be a figment of Minnie Cooper's imagination, or even an invention of the customer in the barber shop who refers to him, obliquely, as the "man scare" that Minnie reportedly had "about a year" before "Dry September" begins; the customer describes him as "a man on the kitchen roof" who was looking at Minnie "undress" (171). We have labeled him 'white' because from the larger story it seems clear that if the reported voyeur had been identified as 'black,' the white men of the town would have had to punish someone.
In "Dry September" over time Minnie Cooper's only social contacts become the women who live in her neighborhood - identified as both "neighbors" and "friends" in the text (175, 180). She occasionally goes to movie with them. While the lynching is going on outside town, a group of them take her to another movie, walking through the streets with her, reassuring her with "voices" that sound "like long, hovering sighs of hissing exultation" that "'there's not a Negro on the Square'" (181).
This is one of the barber shop clients in "Dry September" 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.
In "Dry September" Minnie Cooper's "thin, sallow, unflagging aunt" lives with Minnie and her mother in a "small frame house" (173). After Mrs. Cooper starts "keeping to her room," this "gaunt aunt runs the house" (175).
Mrs. McLendon appears at the end of "Dry September" as the "pale, strained, and weary-looking" wife of the man who leads the lynching party (182). When he comes home at midnight and finds her reading a magazine, he accuses her of waiting up for him, and strikes her.
A Negro who works as the night watchman at the local ice plant in "Dry September," Will Mayes is ambiguously accused by a white woman named Minnie Cooper of assault and lynched by a mob of Jefferson men. The lynching is not narrated. Although the barber says repeatedly that "I know Will Mayes" (169), and believes he is innocent, the narrative refers to him mostly as "the Negro" and does not describe him - his age or physical experience - extensively. Nor does story ever say what, if anything, happened between Will and Minnie.
Henry Hawkshaw first appears in "Dry September." He is a Jefferson barber, described as "a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face" (169). He serves as the point of view through which the story's racial violence is presented. He tries to defend Will Mayes' character against the white men who want to lynch him, and even drives with them hoping to prevent the lynching, but in the end only 'saves' himself or at least his sensibility. When he re-appears in "Hair," his liberal sensibilities are again put into action, this time romantically.
