The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The "Mayor" of Memphis is an acquaintance of Gavin Stevens's Harvard friend, who promises to seek his help in the attempt to locate Mink Snopes (426).

This is the "trusty" who leads Mink out of the prison; he is in Parchman as a "lifer" who "killed his wife with a ball peen hammer" but according to the Warden "was converted and received salvation in jail" (423) - which explains why he would have been made a trusty, that is, a prisoner entrusted by the authorities with various kinds of responsibilities.

"Turnkey" is a colloquial term for jailor; this "turnkey" is the official at Parchman who opens the gate for Mink Snopes (423).

Keeping with entrenched traditions, the Holston House still has "Negro man waiters," some of whom are the sons of previous generations of waiters (421), and in the ladies dressing room there is "a maid" (422).

"One of Yoknapatawpha County's three original settlers" (421), he founded the Holston House hotel.

The novel's cast of characters includes the "last descendants" of Alexander Holston, one of the first white settlers in Yoknapatawpha and the man who established the oldest hotel in Jefferson, these two women are described as "maiden sisters," though the narrator adds, parenthetically, that "one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted" (421). They now own the Holston House, and run it with "cold and inflexible indomitability" (421).

This man, "one of the book-keepers" at Snopes's bank, lets Gavin Stevens in when he goes there after hours to warn Flem about Mink (416).

An unnamed Negro reports to Ratliff about seeing Mink Snopes making his way back to town.

The central office telephone operator - hence called "Central" in the narrative, at one time a familiar way of referring to telephone operators (413) - who connects Ratliff's long-distance call from Parchman to Gavin Stevens in Jefferson.

The hypothetical witness prisoners threaten when incarcerated.