Although not named in this story, we know from other fictions that the narrator's "Father" is also named Charles Mallison. The narrator mentions him once, to compare him to his uncle: "Father just talked to me while Uncle Gavin listened to me" (139).
We can assume that Senator Snopes' local home is in Frenchman's Bend, but all we know for sure is that it is at least "two miles" from the site of the picnic (138).
Huey Long was a controversial populist Louisiana politician who became Governor of Louisiana before rising, as Clarence Snopes hopes to, to the U.S. Senate. Stevens refers to him as "a madman" (137), as if he were still alive, but Long was assassinated in 1935, shortly after announcing his intention to run for President. The most famous of "Long's soak-the-rich battle cries" (132) was "Every man a king."
Clarence Snopes is a particularly venal member of the Snopes family, that "vast sprawling clan of a family or even tribe" (88). "As a young man" he led a gang of "cousins and toadies" who "fought and drank and beat Negroes and terrified young girls" (89), until Billy Varner had him appointed a constable. While working for the law, he joined and became a leader of the "Ku Klux Klan" (130), until for political reasons he became "its mortal enemy," the "dedicated champion of a cause" (131).
Gavin Stevens - "the M.A., Harvard and Ph.D., Heidelberg" (88) - is the most educated man in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and one of its most talkative. He is County Attorney, but according to the story's narrator, his nephew, his "true dedicated vocation is meddling in other people's business" (88). Throughout The Snopes Trilogy, into which this story was interpolated, he appoints himself a champion in the struggle against Snopesism, and in many commentators' opinion, comes more and more in Faulkner's late career to serve as a spokesman for the author.
At the end of the story, "Uncle Gavin" addresses the narrator as "Charles" (139). His last name is never given, but when this story was published in 1955, readers of either Intruder in the Dust (1948) or Knight's Gambit (1949) would have known that Gavin's nephew is Charles (Chick) Mallison.
The narrator just calls him "Ratliff," but near the end Gavin Stevens calls him by the initials that readers of Faulkner's fictions know well: "V.K." (280). One of Faulkner's own favorite characters, V.K. Ratliff is "a slender man, not overly tall," who invariably wears a "tieless faded perfectly clean blue shirt"; the narrator also calls him "a universal": "among men a man, among ladies a gentleman" (86).
This icon represents the "parlor" where Ratliff sells sewing machines to "the doctor's or lawyer's or merchant's or banker's wife" (86). We have located it on the site of the Benbow house in other fictions, but there's no reason to think that the narrator has any one particular parlor or wife or gathering in mind. On the other hand, the occupations of the husbands here, as well as the decor of the parlor as the narrator describes it - "the antimacassars and bell-domed wax flowers and synthetic sea shells" (86) - suggest a wealthy and traditional neighborhood.
This icon represents the "hotel" where Ratliff is at home among the professionals and "drummers" (traveling salesmen) who "gather in the chairs along the banquette" to talk and tell stories (86). We have located it near the Square, but there is no clear sense in the story that the narrator has any one particular hotel or gathering in mind, and in the Yoknapatawpha fictions there are several hotels "in Jefferson itself," which is where these gatherings occur (86).
This icon represents the various "remote back-country dog-trot cabins" that Ratliff visits on his salesman's trips around Yoknapatawpha (86). We have located it in the area where the Bundrens live in As I Lay Dying, but the story does not give any clues to specific locations - except to say that these cabins are far from town, and that the roads by which Ratliff reaches them are unpaved. A "dog-trot" cabin consists of two rooms, separated by a roofed but otherwise open breezeway; this form of housing was widespread across the impoverished rural South.
