The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the police officer who makes Mink move from the bench at Court Square, but also gives him fifty cents so he can "find a bed" (316).

The various residents of Memphis who are mentioned in The Mansion include the people who, "forty-four and -five and -six years ago" (i.e. around the beginning of the 20th century), stood on the levee or "along the bluff" over the river to watch the grand river steamboats being loaded and unloaded (315). This group also includes the various crowds that Mink meets throughout the city.

The river in Memphis that Mink remembers was lined with "chanting stevedores" (315).

Mink remembers that when he was younger there was a Negro in "the lot behind the Commercial Hotel" who would feed his mule for a quarter while he took the train to Memphis (313).

All we know about the member of Goodyhay's sect who gives Mink a ride into Memphis (and whom the narrative only refers to as "the driver," 312) is that he knows his way around the city.

"Bred up on an Arkansas plantation," this U.S. soldier is "new" to the Army when his commander leaves him in a foxhole near the Japanese enemy somewhere in Malaya (306); before he can be relieved or reinforced, he is killed and beheaded.

In The Mansion the story of the dead man who was married to the former prostitute in Goodyhay's congregation is told in matter-of-fact terms in a couple pages by Albert, a member of Goodyhay's congregation. Albert says nothing about how he married his wife, but describes how he decided to kill himself during the fighting at the start of the Second World War. He is a Lieutenant in command of an infantry platoon falling back as part of the confused retreat in "Malaya" (a British colony on the Malay Peninsula, 305).

A woman who used to work in a "Catalpa Street house" (305), an address that means she was a prostitute in one of the many brothels in Memphis. According to Albert, "she looks a little like a whore yet," but after her husband died in World War II, she became a member of Goodyhay's eccentric congregation (305).

Albert tells Mink that this son of the black woman who worships with the white members of Goodyhay's congregation "had it too just like the rest" (305). The Mansion explains what "it" is when Albert adds "even if they didn't put his name on the same side of the monument" with the whites: "it" seems to be that her son was killed fighting during World War II (305).

Much to Mink's surprise, this "big Negro woman" (305) is a congregant of Goodyhay's church. Albert explains to Mink that "her son had it too just like she was a white woman" - "it" is never clearly explained, but probably means that this son was killed during World War II (305). She sits "alone on the back" bench in the service (307), but later moves to the front to sit next to and comfort a white woman; Mink still seems surprised that the only response to this by "the white people" in the benches is to "make way for the Negress to sit down beside the young white woman" (311).