Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sat, 2017-10-21 07:35
Grover Winbush Cleveland is the night marshal; while he spends a lot of his time "leaning all night against a lamp-post looking at the empty Square" (59), he also often sneaks into the "Atelier Monty" to look at French postcards, and one night gets caught. (In The Hamlet, as Ratliff's partner, he is named Aaron Rideout.)
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sat, 2017-10-21 07:31
The first of the two "fellers" - i.e. fellows - whom V.K. Ratliff invents. In this first instance, it is as the protagonist of a comic story: this "feller" has a whimsical exchange with a racoon who apparently knows him by reputation (57).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sat, 2017-10-21 07:29
The "pussel-gutted" (61) Sheriff of Yoknapatawpha, Hub Hampton is a Baptist deacon with seemingly little natural inclination or motivation for his job. Nevertheless, he manages to keep law and order in town. He is described as "a meat-eating hard-shell Baptist deacon whose purest notion of pleasure was counting off the folks he personally knowed was already bound for hell" (58).
After referring to the capital of Mississippi as a "minor hog trough," the narrator goes on to call the capital of the country "that vast and limitless" hog trough (271). For Clarence Snopes, "his aim, his ambition, was and had been all the time: Washington, Congress" (271) - but thanks to Ratliff, he never gets a chance to go there (271). "Washington" is also where Colonel Devries is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his genuine heroism, which may be the story's way of recuperating somewhat the image of the seat of U.S. government.
The Korean peninsula was divided into two countries in 1948. The Korean War in which Devries served so heroically began in June 1950, when North Korea invaded the South. U.S. troops began arriving to defend South Korea that same year; by 1951, when Devries arrived there, hundreds of thousands of Americans were engaged. The War has never formally ended, but armed conflict came to an end in July 1953.
In the short story "By the People" Devries earns a Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery as the commander of a unit of Negro troops during the Korean War. The Korean peninsula was divided into two countries in 1948. The Korean War in which Devries served so heroically began in June 1950, when North Korea invaded the South. U.S. troops began arriving to defend South Korea that same year; by 1951, when Devries arrived there, hundreds of thousands of Americans were engaged. The War has never formally ended, but armed conflict came to an end in July 1953.
Jackson is the capital of Mississippi. Clarence Snopes moves there after he is elected to the state legislature. The narrator's depiction of the state politics as a "hog trough" is very cynical (132), and nothing Clarence does there, including teaching "a Sunday school class" at a Baptist church in Jackson (132) while politically "preaching the same hatred of Negroes and Catholics and Jews" as the KKK which he had campaigned against (131), gives readers any reason to view it otherwise.
Courthouse Square sits at the center of both the town of Jefferson and the county of Yoknapatawpha. It only appears once in this story as the setting of an event, when Stevens "found" Ratliff "somewhere on the Square" (88). Throughout Digital Yoknapatawpha, however, we also use the Square as the default location for Jefferson events or characters that are not identified with a specific place in town, or as the location from which a first-person story is being told, when no specific setting for the narrator is provided.
Gavin Stevens' law office is located on Jefferson's Square, "upstairs" on the second floor of one of the businesses that surround the courthouse (88); it is a location that Faulkner returns to more and more often across the course of his career.
The church in Frenchman's Bend is mentioned twice in the story. The first time, as the one that Clarence Snopes belongs to, it is explicitly identified as "Baptist" (132). When "the church" is mentioned again, it is as the one Grier and Bookright "shingled" (137), a story Faulkner told in "Shingles for the Lord" (1943). Frenchman's Bend is certainly big enough, and religious enough, to support a Methodist Church as well as a Baptist one, but the text doesn't give us any real reason to doubt that Snopes, Grier and Bookright all belong to the same Baptist congregation.
