Unnamed Negro Inmates

The five other black men in the county jail where Lucas is held are described by the narrative as the "crap-shooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers" who are kept in a single large room on the second floor (30). Some of these prisoners are assigned to what the narrative calls the "street gang" that works outside the jail maintaining town property (54). Under ordinary circumstances, the narrator says twice, the barred window of the second-floor cell would be "thick with dark hands" as the prisoners interact with friends and family on the outside (38, 50), but like Yoknapatawpha's black population in general, once Lucas is arrested even these hands disappear.