The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Mrs. Harriss's mother is referred to as her husband’s "own life’s one monogamous love" (150). (Based on other Yoknapatawpha fictions, this woman is Mrs. Backus, but that name is not used in "Knight's Gambit.")

The teachers employed to educate the Harriss children are described as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145).

Mrs. Harriss's "middle-aged father" is a "widower-owner who stayed at home and farmed his heritage and, with a constant tumbler of thin whiskey-and-water at his elbow and the aged setter bitch dozing at his feet, sat through the long summer afternoons in a home-made chair on the front gallery, reading in Latin the Roman poets" (150).

Charles Mallison's grandmother is mentioned in terms of his cultural inheritance: "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149). Later she is mentioned when Gavin Stevens tells Charles about a visit he pays the young Mrs. Harris in 1919: "So it was just dusk when I stopped your grandmother's car at the gate and got out" (246).

Charles Mallison's grandfather is mentioned in terms of Charles Mallison’s cultural inheritance ("the books which his grandfather had chosen or heired," 149). Also Gavin's father, this man is identified as Lemuel Stevens in The Town (1957).

Mr. Mallison, Charles' biological father and Maggie's husband, appears in this story only in a phrase about the way books are passed on as family possessions: Charles "would heir in his turn from his mother and father" (149). This is typical of the negligible role Charles Mallison, Sr., plays in the other texts that mention him, perhaps to keep the focus on his son's much more significant relationship with his uncle Gavin.

Talking with Max Harris about his plot, Gavin Stevens mentions "other Negroes" - other than the "grooms" who tend to the horses and dogs - on the family plantation (234). Presumably these are the servants inside the big house that Mr. Harriss built, but no other details about them are provided.

The "few Negro servants" who worked for Mrs. Harriss' father in the earlier days were the her only "companions" growing up (150).

Now a farmer a few miles from town, Captain Warren "had been a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps before it became the RAF" (206). Charles Mallison asks for Captain Warren’s advice about joining up. Warren is pragmatic in saving the sixteen-year-old from himself: "Look. There’s plenty of time. There’ll be plenty and more for all of us before it’s over. Why not wait?" (207).

Miss Cayley is the "farmer's daughter" who is engaged to Max Harriss, and also another of Sebastian Gualdres' dalliances (191). She is "about the same age as the Harriss girl but not quite as tall, slender yet solid too, as country-bred girls can look, with dark hair and black eyes" (192–93).