The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This man on the Square is mistaken by Linda for Willy Christian, but "old man Christian" had died while she was away (224).

According to Charles Mallison, Ratliff expects that "some woman" will come along one day and marry Gavin Stevens, after deciding that he is "dependable enough at last for steady work in place of merely an occasional chore" (215).

This figure runs the restaurant at the airport in Memphis where Gavin and Ratliff stop for a coffee while they wait for Linda.

The "two children" of Melisandre Backus and her wealthy husband, Harriss, are not given first names. In his narrative, Charles Mallison calls the daughter "a princess" (218); after her father's death, her mother takes her and her brother to Europe to live.

The Backus estate has a whole slew of "butlers and footmen" just for their horses; Melisandre also has an extensive domestic staff of "maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries" (218). Later the "Negro houseman and one of the maids" are mentioned (399). The Mansion does not provide any more details, but it's safe to assume that, like the houseman, most of these employees are black, but given the racial categorization in Yoknapatawpha, it's likely that the 'secretaries' are not.

The son of Melisandre Backus and the "bootleg czar" she marries is ironically called the "czarevitch" (217).

This is the "nurse" who tends to Melisandre Backus Harriss' first child (217). "Nurse" in this case means "wet nurse" or "nursemaid."

The "Negro coachman" drives Melisandre to school every day (217).

Owner of "what used to be one of our biggest plantations," Melisandre Backus's father lets his property decay, spending his time "on the front gallery in the summer and in the library in the winter with a bottle of whiskey and a volume of Horace" (217).

A New Orleans "underworld bigshot" who marries Melisandre Backus. He dies in a New Orlean's barber chair of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e. he was shot by another gangster.