The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

During Mink's long confinement at Parchman there is a turnover of wardens. It is not clear when the old warden leaves and this new one arrives. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, this second warden is remarkably kind and sympathetic towards Mink.

"Jehovah's Shareholders" is the name of a religious sect in Parchman's Penitentiary (111). According to the narrator, it was "headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness" (111). The specific crimes are "bigamy" and embezzlement for a woman, "his wife or someone else's," or occasionally "a professional prostitute" (111).

According to Mink, his father was a "son of a bitch" (111). Mink is doubtless referring to the way he had "to fight his father" to get even a "pittance" of the money they made as tenant farmers (318), and the way his father constantly beat his second wife, Mink's step-mother.

Mink says that "the lady that raised me" was "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).

The guard at Parchman Penitentiary who shoots Jake Barron.

One of the prisoners at Parchman penitentiary when Mink is there, Jake Barron has "most of his head blown off" when he tries to escape (107).

Stillwell is in Parchman Penitentiary for murdering this "Vicksburg prostitute" (107).

Stillwell is "a gambler who had cut the throat of a Vicksburg prostitute" (107). He is also the ringleader of the group of inmates that attempts a breakout from Parchman Penitentiary; he is the only one who escapes successfully. Subsequently he threatens to kill Mink when Mink is finally released.

The specific chain gang that Mink works on while at Parchman's consists of eleven men altogether, who go to and from the "mess hall to eat" and the cotton field where they are forced to work "shackled to the same chain" (105). The three who are named - Mink himself, Stillwell and Barron - are all white, and they live inside the penitentiary in "a detached wire-and-canvas-and-plank hut," so it seems safe to assume that in the segregrated South, all eleven are white, but that is an assumption. The gang tries to kill Mink after he objects to their plan to escape.

Mink imagines that someone else will kill Flem before he can.