Unnamed Negro Inmates

In the "common room" beside the cell holding Cotton are the men the narrative calls the "minor prisoners" (163). In Faulkner's fiction the men in this holding pen are invariably black; in this case they are described as "a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets," who have been jailed for vagrancy, selling whiskey and shooting craps (163). One of them is at the window, "yelling down to someone" outside the jail (163), and one talks to Cotton, telling him to "Hush up, white man" when he starts going into detail about Houston's corpse (164).