The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Jefferson's African-American population appears in the novel indirectly, in several narrative references to them as a group and from several different political perspectives. On his trip into Jefferson at the beginning of the novel, for example, Mink walks through a "section [of] all Negro homes" (38) between the Square and the railroad depot; his thoughts seem to include the actual 'Negroes' who live in these homes, though no people come clearly into focus.

When Gavin refers to "John L. Lewis' C.I.O." he is referring to the American labor leader who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 (236).

These two Finns are among the more exotic inhabitants of Jefferson. They escaped "from Russia in 1917" and then "from Europe in 1919" (236). The 1917 Russian Revolution produced a lot of refugees and set off a civil war in neighboring Finland, but the text does not provide any details about what these two Finns were doing in Russia or why they had to "escape" from Europe when they did. "In the early twenties" they arrive in Jefferson, where one becomes a cobbler, taking over Nightingale's shop, and the other a tinsmith.

The ministers in Jefferson, all of whom would be Protestants, resent Eula for her open infidelity. Later in the narrative, however, the town's "white ministers" cannot find a reason to "go on record against" Linda Snopes Kohl's work as a Sunday school teacher at "one of the Negro churches" (254).

The "RFC captain" in World War I who, according to Uncle Gavin, was so young and had "such a record" that the British government sent him home before the end of the war so that "he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority" - i.e. the day he turned twenty-one (232). (The Royal Flying Corps was the original name of the RAF, the better-known Royal Air Force.)

Although the novel quotes "the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin" telling the French people to "Be calm. I am here" (231), in historical fact Maurice Gamelin was the French Army General whose handling of the German invasion in World War II was a disastrous failure.

On his journey to Europe, Chick has two unnamed traveling companions. He ends up traveling alone, however, when "at the last moment [they] find themselves incapable of passing Paris" (230).

This is the younger Spoade, who follows his father's footsteps to Harvard, where he is a classmate of Charles Mallison; he invites Charles "to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like" (229). (The Saint Cecilia Society in Charleston is an upper class social club that was originally organized in 1766; its annual balls have been around since 1820.)

Luther appears in two different roles in the novel. The narrative mentions that he is the best bird shot in the county who "shot left-handed" (228). When he appears near the end, after having been "a professional dog-trainer and market-hunter and farmer," he is serving his uncle-in-law the Sheriff as the county's "jailor" - and as the self-appointed secret "bodyguard" for Flem Snopes (448).

Benbow Sartoris is the son of Bayard and Narcissa, and as his two names suggest, the 20th century descendant of two of Yoknapatawpha's oldest families. His birth occurs at the end of Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust (1929), but he seldom appears again in the canon, and when he does appear, it is in minor roles; in The Mansion Charles Mallison says he is going "out to Sartoris to shoot quail with Benbow," adding that although Benbow "wasn't but seventeen," he was one of "the best bird shots in the county" (228).