The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

While Mink Snopes spends the night in the waiting room at the railroad station, he hears the telegraph operator "talking to somebody now and then," but the source of this second voice is never identified (39).

The night telegraph operator lets Mink sleep in the station's waiting room.

When Mink watches people getting off and on the train at the Jefferson station, he thinks of them as "rich men and women"; when he thinks of the people on the train itself, he thinks of them as "the other rich ones" (38). They certainly have more money than Mink, but are probably mostly middle-class; under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white. (Near he end of the novel he remembers these people forty years later, 445.)

Monk watches the conductor with curiosity and envy as he does his job of helping passengers off and on the train.

Mink watches this Negro, who strikes him as "uppity," got off the train and put down a footstool so passengers can disembark (38).

Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro.

Mink sees the engineer "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39).

This group of "men and boys" come repeatedly each day to the shed by the depot to see the trains pass (38).

The owner of an "automobile jitney" - usually a small passenger bus (38). (In The Reivers it turns out that he is the son of Boon Hogganbeck, but there is no hint of that in this novel.)

While some "old people" are included in the group that goes to the movie in Jefferson ("couples, young men and girls and old people," 36), this entry represents the "old people" that the narrative specifically identifies, who "didn't go to the picture show" but instead sit in their rocking chairs (38).