Unnamed Members of Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist, white supremacist organization that came into existence in the South after the surrender at Appomattox and the abolition of slavery. Over the decades it has grown stronger and weaker, spread to other parts of the U.S., and identified "Catholics and Jews" (131) as targets in addition to the African Americans it originally sought to subjugate. The story's narrator keeps his distance from the organization, referring to "the klavern or whatever they called it" (130) and twice to the positions of Klan leadership that Clarence Snopes holds as "its Kleagle, Dragon, whatever the title was" (131); he adds that "in our country" (by which he presumably means Yoknapatawpha) the KKK "never got very far and didn't last very long" (130). The basis of Snopes' appeal to the more "liberal" voters in Jefferson is his professed determination to "destroy the Ku Klux Klan in our county" (131). In historical fact, Mississippi has been one of its strongholds, though this story and The Mansion, the novel in which this story is retold, are the only Faulkner texts that mention it by name. This entry includes the unnamed "veteran ranking Klansman" who speaks in the story, when he acknowledge the defeat of his organization by "a handful of schoolteachers and editors and Sunday school superintendents" (131).