Unnamed Descendants of the Frenchman's Slaves
Character Key Number:
2062
Display Name:
Unnamed Descendants of the Frenchman's Slaves
Sort Name:
Unnamed Descendants of the Frenchman's Slaves
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
No
Biography:
Both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and The Hamlet refer to the enslaved people who labored on the Frenchman's place before the Civil War as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136, 375). Nothing more is said, but implicitly this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which millions of southern blacks moved to northern cities (a movement that was just beginning at the time the story and the novel take place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s