Near the end of the novel's third prose section, the narrator looks up from the story he is telling to address the reader directly as "you" (198). He identifies the reader as "a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West" (198), and speculates that "you" may be college educated, or "perhaps even" have an graduate degree from "Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205). This second person plays a significant if rhetorical role in the way the history of Yoknapatawpha is ultimately evoked.
The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race.
This icon represents the "kin or friends or acquaintances" of the "outlanders" who move to Jefferson after World War II; they are described as visiting "from the East or North or California" on their way "to New Orleans or Florida" (196).
This is not the "GOVERNOR" who appears in the novel's Act II, but a "Governor of the State" who was once held in the Jefferson jail for thirty days after being sentenced for contempt of court (196). This episode is based on the real experience of former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo, a native of Oxford, who in 1922 spent the same thirty days in jail.
During the Union occupation of Jefferson during the Civil War, the jail is used as the "provost-marshal's guard-house" (196); a provost marshal is in charge of a unit of military police.
Over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them US citizens) were interned as "enemy aliens" (194) in camps during World War II. Most of them had been living on the west coast, and all the interment camps were west of the Mississippi.
The German tank gun that serves as Jefferson's monument to World War II was captured "by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms," the sons of interned Japanese Americans (194). (Over 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, many in the 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.)
These "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194).
