Looking for a figure of speech to describe Clytemnestra as an old woman, Shreve says that she "shrunk" - "like the Bornese do their captured heads" (175). After Borneo was colonized, the Dayak practice of "headhunting" was widely sensationalized in Europe and the U.S. In Faulkner's short story "Vendee," set during the Civil War, the Sartoris family library includes a "book about Borneo" that describes such practices.
This icon represents the "wagon full of strangers moving from Arkansas" to someplace else; they attempt to spend the night in the "rotting shell" of old Sutpen mansion, but flee when "something happened before they could begin to unload the wagon even" (172-73).
This icon represents the group of "four or five other boys of [Quentin's] size and age" who go out to the decaying Sutpen mansion "daring one another to evoke the ghost, since it would have to be haunted" (172). The group includes Luster; the other boys are not described, but all run away when confronted by Clytemnestra among the "rotting piles" of the old slave quarters (173).
Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).
The "inescapably negro" woman whom Charles E. S-V. Bon marries (168) is apparently somewhat mentally deficient; at least, "her mentality" is mentioned disparagingly (167), and she is described as "existing" in an "automaton-like state" (166). The phrase "inescapably negro" is attributed to Judith; the phrases that Mr. Compson uses to describe her include "coal black and ape-like" (166); "resembling something in a zoo" (169), and "the black gargoyle" (170).
After Rosa Coldfield returns to her house in Jefferson in 1866, "the town - farmers passing, negro servants going to work in white kitchens" - see her raiding the neighbors' gardens "before sunup" (138). "The town" is often a kind of character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the way this passage identifies the town with "farmers" (who are from the country) and "servants" (who are not white) is exceptional.
"The justice's court" in which Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned is described as "crowded" (163); "every face in the room" looks at the prisoner at the moment when the justice himself asks him "What are you?" (165).
Jim Hamblett is the "justice" in the courthouse when Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned for fighting at the "negro ball" (164). In the middle of scolding the prisoner as "a white man" for stirring up racial ill-will at the time that the South seeks "to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor," he suddenly stops to ask the prisoner: "What are you?" (165).
This icon represents the "negroes" at the "ball" where Charles E. S-V. Bon starts a fight (164). Before the fight they are described as "dancing" and having a "dice game in the kitchen"; they are described fighting as "a moiling clump of negro backs and heads and black arms and hands clutching sticks of stove wood and cooking implements and razors" (164).
