These poor people, who are housed by the county, know about Mr. Hait's death and have "heard that Mrs. Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him" (242).
Gavin refers to "the Jefferson ladies" and their speculation about the reason Young Bayard Sartoris "drove too fast" (149). Charles refers to "the various Jefferson ladies" who for many years "had been locking themselves in the bathroom" to avoid Old Het (241).
"Miz" Mannie Hait, widow of Lonzo Hait, staunchly defends her house against the attack of I.O. Snopes and his mules, but is defeated by her own carelessness. In the end, however, despite the loss of her house, she manages to even the score.
Currently a resident of the local poorhouse and believed to have been wet nurse to many Jefferson citizens, she is said to be "about seventy, though by her own counting, calculated from the ages of various Jefferson ladies fom brides to grandmothers that she claimed to have nursed from infancy, she would be around a hundred and, as Ratliff said, at least triplets" (241). Charles describes her as "tall, lean, of a dark chocolate color, voluble, cheerful" (242). Even if she's only 70, she would have been born into slavery, though the novel does not register that.
Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of the novel, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not. (This event is first described on pages 38-39.)
Mink has two actual daughters; this "daughter," who lives in "the Delta," is one he invents to keep the Negro cotton farmer from identifying him (439).
The trusty in Parchman is a "lifer" - someone sentenced to life imprisonment - for killing "his wife with a ball peen hammer" (423). Her father has sworn to kill the man, but we don't know anything more about her.
"The gal's paw" (424) - that is how Ratliff refers to the father of the wife whom the penitentiary trusty had murdered. This man has "swore he would kill [the trusty] the first time he crossed the Parchman fence" (424).
While remembering his three earlier trips to Memphis, Mink Snopes thinks about "the mentor and guide who had told him about the houses in Memphis" where one could buy sex (317). This "guide" accompanies him to the city on his first trip, forty-seven years ago.
