The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Several thousand Japanese sailors and aviators participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor that provoked the U.S. to declare war, but this entry reflects the unusual way Charles Mallison describes the attack: "a Jap dropped a bomb on another American" (254).

Passing through Jefferson from preflight to basic training, Charles Mallison sees "the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators" (251). "Operators" here seems to mean 'managers.'

Passing through Jefferson on his way from pre-flight to basic training, Charles Mallison sees "the wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers" who are making one of their weekly visits to town (251). By 'hill farmers,' the narrative means the families that farm on the poorer land in the hilly parts of Yoknapatawpha county.

After the U.S. enters the Second World War, Benbow Sartoris is sent to England on "something hush hush" for the war effort (251). Benbow appears in five other Yoknapatawpha fictions, as the son of Bayard Sartoris and Narcissa Benbow. Generationally, he is the last member of either of these old Yoknapatawpha families, and this brief mention of him is, chronologically, his last appearance.

Although Sebastian Gualdres’s friends in Mississippi are "all sorts of people," the Whitmanian type tends to dominate the description of them: "out-of-doors men, usually bachelors" (174). The range of occupations they are identified with is wide: from "farmers" to "mechanics"; "a civil engineer," "a professional horse-and-mule trader," "two young men on the highway maintenance crew" and "a locomotive fireman" (174).

The "five or six girls" who "attended the female half of the Academy" with Mrs. Harriss and "who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152). These girlhood friends are the women who would receive seasonal cards from Mrs. Harriss "postmarked from Rome or London or Paris or Vienna or Cairo" (166). Maggie Mallison is one of these women, but none of the others are named.

Elements of the (white) population of Yoknapatawpha are referred to in several ways in the story. Their most pervasive role is as a kind of audience: "the county watches" the actions of the main characters unfold "as the subscribers [to a magazine] read and wait and watch for the serial's next installment" (149). For example, the people whom Gavin Stevens calls "the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes" share gossip and speculations about an unknown man who may have courted Mrs. Harris before her marriage to Mr. Harriss (151) and watch "by hearsay and supposition" as Mr.

In "Knight's Gambit" this is the specific groom among the various stablemen who work for Sebastian Gualdres who is in charge of his blind "night horse"; Gauldres tells Gavin Stevens that this mare "is left in the stable by the negrito each afternoon" (227).

This character 'appears' in the novella by way of one of Faulkner's typical negative formulations, at the end of a sentence that develops the idea that Sebastian Gualdres is "stranger" in Yoknapatawpha: accordingly, when locals visit him at the Backus-Harriss Plantation, they are "guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father's and grandfather's too" - that is, they are his guests (174). But the point here is that this woman - Mrs.

Hence Cayley is the father of the "country girl" (192) who's been dating Max Harriss; according to her, "he dont think Max is any good" (193). His farm is "about two miles" from the Harriss place (192).