The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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).

While walking through Jefferson, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37).

Male "guests" staying at the Holston House are required to wear "a coat and necktie" in the diningroom, while women guests must have their "heads covered" (421). The only guests whom the novel specifically identifies, however, are all men: "drummers" - i.e. traveling salesmen (37).

The first car on the streets of Jefferson was "the home-made automobile a man named Buffaloe had made in his back yard" (37). That is all The Mansion says about him, but elsewhere he is identified as the town's electrical engineer.

The fact that this novel most often refers to Bayard Sartoris by what Faulkner elsewhere refers to as his "courtesy title" of "Colonel" may be confusing. This novel's "Colonel Sartoris" never served in any army, but as the son of John Sartoris, who was a Confederate colonel during the Civil War, he has inherited that title. Better known to most readers as "Bayard" or "Old Bayard," he is a major figure in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and even narrates The Unvanquished (1938).

Manfred de Spain is "the son of a Confederate cavarly officer" and a graduate of the military academy at West Point (142). He served in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War as a lower-ranking officer, but he inherited his title of "Major de Spain" as a kind of courtesy title from his father, who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. After his service in Cuba, this "Major" returns home to become the mayor of Jefferson and the president of the new bank, and to own one of the first two cars in Jefferson, a "red racer" (p. 37).

The man who sells tickets to the movie at Jefferson's Airdome appears only as "a voice" that speaks to Mink "from the ticket window" (37).

Throughout the novel anonymous groups of white people in Jefferson bear witness to the characters and events. The most explicit description of them occurs during a discussion of the communist political ideas brought into Jefferson by two Finnish immigrants and, after her experiences in Greenwich Village and the Spanish Civil War, Linda Snopes Kohl. According to Charles Mallison the "white male Jeffersons" of every class - "the operators of Saturday curb-side peanut- and popcorn-vending machines . . . the side street and back alley grocers . . .

Trying to buy ammunition to kill Houston, Mink claims that this unnamed black man saw a bear's footprint at Blackwater Slough.

Walter Ewell appears or is mentioned in five other fictions, always in connection with hunting. He is only mentioned here, when Mink remembers him as one of the "best hunters in the county" (34).