Major de Spain(2)

The narrator refers to Major de Spain as "an old man, too old you would have said to have had a son just twenty-three" (107). He was born after the Civil War, probably around 1870, and his title of "Major" is an honorary one, inherited from his father who held that rank in the Confederate Army. The narrator not only identifies him as "a banker powerful in money and politics both" (107), but knows that he meets with men asking for extensions on their loans in his big house. As a successful political power broker in Mississippi in 1942 he would have to be a Democrat, but from his rage against the federal government and "organized labor" it can be safely assumed that he is a conservative one.