The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Marvin Hait is "our local horse-and-mule trader" (202). He may be the same character as Hait, the mule trader who appears in "Mule in the Yard," and Lonzo Hait, as he is named in The Town, but the 'corrected text' of The Mansion says nothing to make that more or less likely. (On the other hand, in their one volume edition of the Snopes trilogy the editors Random House changed Hait's first name in The Mansion from Marvin to Lonzo.)

Clarence Snopes is introduced as a younger member of "a vast sprawling clan of a family or even tribe," the Snopeses of Frenchman's Bend (89). Faulkner's imagination returns to the Snopeses, in fascination and horror, from the beginning to the end of the Yoknapatawpha story. Although the individual Snopeses in the various fictions are often complex and even sympathetic, as a "tribe" they serve as the symbol of the modern, devolved South.

This school principal recommends that Tug Nightingale "quit" school after he got "almost as far as the fourth grade" (202).

Mr. Nightingale is "a little scrawny man who wouldn't weigh a hundred pounds" even holding all the tools of his trade (201). His trade is shoe repair, "cobbling" (201). He is also a "Hardshell Baptist" who believes the earth is flat, and an ex-Confederate and unreconstructed Southerner who was "seventeen years old" at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He gets very upset when his son joins the "Yankee" army to fight in World War I (202).

The son of a cobbler and the local house painter, Tug Nightingale is over thirty years old when he enlists - over his father's furious objections - in the US Army at the start of World War I. He serves in the War as a cook.

Charles describes how "the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then" (199) and the "eight- and nine- and ten-year old males" (200) regarded the men returning from in World War I with their "wound- and service-stripes" and "medal ribbons" (200).

Charles Mallison remembers the "war heroes" who returned to Jefferson after World War I, both the "wounded" and the "unscratched ones" who wore their "divisional shoulder patches and wound- and service-stripes and medal ribbons" around town (200).

This army nurse, "kin" to a Jefferson family, comes to Jefferson after the end of World War I as the town's "first female hero," having served as a lieutenant on a base hospital in France "within sound of the guns behind Montdidier" (199).

Unlike Uncle Gavin, Uncle Billy Varner is not related to the narrator - or to anyone else in this story, except as he is "distantly kin by marriage" to Clarence Snopes (88). (The story of the Varner family, however, is a major narrative element in the larger Snopes trilogy.) "Uncle" is a kind of title, signifying his power as the "patriarch and undisputed chief" of the "whole section" known as Frenchman's Bend (88). He owns land and businesses there, and also controls local politics.

The man who challenges Clarence Snopes in the Congressional race is from an (invented) county east of Yoknapatawpha. Like the narrator, he had been a soldier "in that decade between 1942 and 1952" (133). He comes back from Korea with a chest full of medals, including "the top one" (134) - i.e. the Congressional Medal of Honor - and a "mechanical leg" (136).