The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In Intruder in the Dust Chick sees the white people who go to the churches in Jefferson on Sunday morning as "men in their dark suits and women in silks and parasols and girls and young men two and two, flowing and decorous" (41).

In The Sound and the Fury, Dilsey, Frony, Luster, and Benjy pass "white people in bright clumps" on their way to church (290). Jason also notes the people going to church as he drives out of town chasing after his niece.

Like the women and old men in "Red Leaves," the tribe's children do not go out in pursuit of the fugitive slave.

Among the Jefferson people Hawkshaw barbers in "Hair" are children, to whom he gives peppermints.

This is the man who drives Mrs. Compson out to the Sartoris place in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished.

According to The Town, when Major de Spain returns from the Spanish-American War determined to modernize Jefferson, "nothing had happened in [the town] since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another renegade Mississippian" (11). The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South.

In its brief summation of the experience of Jackson, Mississippi, during Reconstruction Requiem for a Nun evokes the stereotypical bogeyman of the Yankee carpetbagger. According to this account, during the Civil War these men made profits from selling the Union military "spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules"; after the surrender they came South carrying "carpet bags stuffed with ballot-forms" to exploit the freedmen (87). During Reconstruction they "cover the South like a migration of locusts" (187).

The "carpet-bagger followers of victorious armies" (265) and their descendants, the men who did not fight in the Civil War but merely profited from it, are mentioned several times in Go Down, Moses, by the narrator and by McCaslin Edmonds. They are defined by “a single fierce will for rapine and pillage” (276).

The Reivers says little about the "owner of the car" that was the first automobile ever seen in Jefferson, other than that he drove down from Memphis and that he trusts Buffaloe with the car for two weeks (26).

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion the "owner of the car" in which Clarence Snopes takes refuge from the dogs is apparently not one of the "they" who drive the Senator home and "fetch [him] a pair of dry britches" (138, 349).