The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Buck Connors II is the son of Marshal Buck Connors and friends with Chick Mallison. Chick remembers him as one of the boys who was hunting with him along Harrykin Creek.

Big Top is Guster's husband and father to Aleck Sander and Little Top. Only his name appears in the narrative (55).

As Charles Mallison notes in his narrative, "he was Guster's boy and his father was named Top too so they called him Big Top and Top Little Top" (55). Charles however always calls him "Top" in the few places where he appears. He and Gowan Stevens try to help Gavin by setting a trap for De Spain's car.

This is the woman identified as "the second lady" who condescendingly reproves Maggie Mallison for calling on Eula Snopes (53).

When this woman learns that Maggie Mallison has called on Eula Snopes, she condescendingly reproves Maggie.

Mr. Backus is the father of Maggie Mallison's friend Melisandre: "He was a good farmer. He just spent the rest of his time sitting on the gallery in summer and in the library in winter with the bottle, reading Latin poetry" (52).

Melisandre Backus lives on a plantation "about six miles from town" and was a friend of Maggie Mallison's in high school and at the Jefferson seminary (52). At one time, Maggie had hoped that Gavin would marry Melisandre. (He does in the last volume of the Snopes trilogy.)

Guster is wife to Big Top and mother to Little Top and Aleck Sander. She works for the Mallisons as a cook. She was named "Paralee" in the earlier novel Intruder in the Dust.

Aleck Sander, whose mother, Guster, works for the Mallisons, is Chick Mallison's contemporary and boyhood companion. His older brother is Top. Aleck Sander hunts rabbits with Chick and Chick's three white companions. (Aleck Sander is not a first and last name, but the way his given name, Alexander, is invariably spoken; the novel does not give him or his other family members a last name.)

The character whom the narrators of the novel call "Colonel Sartoris" inherited his title as the son of Colonel John Sartoris. In most other Yoknapatawpha fictions he is called by his name, Bayard Sartoris, though in the next Snopes novel, The Mansion, the narrators again refer to him only as "Colonel Sartoris." In those other fictions there is no record of his being in the Civil War at all, but here Gavin Stevens calls him "our present banker-honorary colonel who had been only an uncommissioned A.D.C. on his father's staff, back in that desperate twilight of 1864-65" (43).