The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Gihon is a federal agent of "no particular age between twenty-five and fifty" (259) who appears in the narrative after "the police find out" that Linda Kohl is "a communist" (236).

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin led the Communist revolution against czarist rule in Russia, and was the head of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Gavin mentions him when he refers to Communist Russia as "Lenin's frankenstein" (259).

The president of Yoknapatawpha's Board of Supervisors meets with Flem to ask for his help in ending Linda's campaign to improve the education of local Negro children.

The husband of the woman who effaces the racist epithet on Mink and Linda's sidewalk appears parenthetically, in what is apparently meant to represent the woman's thoughts rather than the narrative's comment on the subordination of women: the words have no place "on the sidewalk of the street she (and her husband of course) lived and owned property on" (251).

After someone writes "nigger Lover" on the sidewalk in front of Flem Snopes' house (250), this neighbor "viciously, angrily" uses a broom to "obscure" the words (251) - not, the narrative notes, because she shares "Linda's impossible dream" of improving black lives in Jefferson, but "because she lived on this street" (251).

After returning from Spain, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). The black teachers in the school (along with their students) are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). Linda's plan would "send" these same black teachers "North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are" - meanwhile replacing them in the school in Jefferson with white teachers (250).

When Linda Snopes Kohl takes her campaign to improve black schools to "the County Board of Supervisors" they at first try politely to talk her out of the idea (250); when she persists, they "didn't dare unlock their door while they were in session" and resort to having their lunch snuck in "through the back window" of the meeting room (251).

Like the Ku Klux Klan, the "Silver Shirts" is, or was, a real white supremacist, antisemitic organization (131). Its official name was the Silver Legion of America, but its nickname acknowledges its ideological indebtedness to Brown Shirts in Germany, the fascist group that helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power in the 1930s. It was founded in North Carolina in early 1933. Clarence Snopes is "one of the first in Mississippi to join it" (131), believing, the narrator suggests, that it will outlast "the old Klan which he had wrecked" (132).

The Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist, white supremacist organization that came into existence in the South after the surrender at Appomattox and the abolition of slavery. Over the decades it has grown stronger and weaker, spread to other parts of the U.S., and identified "Catholics and Jews" (131) as targets in addition to the African Americans it originally sought to subjugate.