The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This icon represents the two different but essentially interchangeable groups of workers who turn the old plantation that Harriss inherits into a conspicuously modern and lavish show place. The text even uses the same word to describe both groups: "gangs." First on the scene are the "gangs of strange men with enough machinery to have built a high-way or a reservoir" who build the stables, paddock, and polo field (161).

Harriss rents the plantation he inherits from his father-in-law to this "caretaker," a man who "didn’t even live in the county" but commutes from Memphis except during planting and harvest season, when he camps out in one the abandoned Negro cabins (159-60).

Melissa Hogganbeck is a history teacher at the Jefferson Academy that Charles Mallison attends. Her "tireless cultured educated 'lady's' voice" makes it hard for him to endure the class which she "now called World Affairs with capitals on both" (209).

Sebastian Gualdres is "the Argentine cavalry captain" whom Mrs. Harriss and her children meet in South America after Mr. Harriss's death (170). He is one of the more exotic figures to appear in Yoknapatawpha. The narrative notes the stereotypical assumptions that the people of Yoknapatawpha have about him as "a Latin" (174), but in its depiction of his courtesy, his pride and his machismo, the narrative itself seems not unwilling to reinforce the stereotypes. Gavin Stevens calls him a "dark romantic foreign knight" (192, though he is not the "knight" of the story's title).

The only child of a nameless father who owns a cotton plantation in Yoknapatawpha, and a mother who apparently died giving birth to her, the woman whom the narrative and the other characters never call anything but "Mrs. Harriss" acquires that name when she "marries a man whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before" (150). Her husband is a wealthy gangster from New Orleans, and the text suggests she may have married him "in order to lift the mortgage on the homestead" (155).

Like her mother, the 20-year-old daughter of "Mrs. Harriss" never gets a first name. In other respects too she takes after her mother: "looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain" (190–91). Like her brother, Max, Miss Harriss has been spoiled.

Mr. Harriss is an outlander - "a man whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before" (150) - who marries the daughter of a Yoknapatawphian plantation owner.

The son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss, and aged twenty-one, Max Harris is the older of their "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192), and the son takes after the father; in a sense, the eyes have it: "the same delicate face which the sister had, but with nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). When Sebastian Gualdres beats him at everything - horses, fencing, women - that the young Yoknapatawphian thinks he has mastered, Max's resentment gives birth to a particularly original scheme for murder.

Gavin Stevens, the fifty-year-old (183) "County Attorney" (144), is the central character of all six of the stories in Knight's Gambit, where as an unofficial detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes he solves five crimes and - in the story "Knight's Gambit" - prevents one. He is much the best-educated character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions: Harvard graduate, Heidelberg Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa. During the First World War he served "three years as a stretcher-bearer in the French army" (154). This experience has left its mark: "shock of premature white hair" (147).

Charles Mallison's mother and Gavin Stevens' sister, Maggie Mallison "attended the female half of the Academy" with Mrs. Harriss and was one of the "five or six girls . . . who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152). She is one of the girlhood friends who would receive seasonal cards from Mrs. Harriss "postmarked from Rome or London or Paris or Vienna or Cairo" (166).