In The Town W.C. Handy, the famous Negro band leader and composer "from Beale Street in Memphis," provides the music for the Cotillion Ball (76). In the larger canon, Handy also provided Faulkner with the title of the short story "That Evening Sun" (1931) - one of Handy's most famous songs is "St. Louis Blues" (1914), which begins "I hate to see that evening sun go down." The novel calls him "Professor Handy" (76); Handy called himself, and has often been called by others, 'the Father of the Blues.'
In the Vintage International edition of The Town that we use as our source text, "Miss Emily Habersham" arranges for Bryon Snopes' children to travel "back home, to Byron Snopes or the reservation or wherever it was" (389). She may be some kind of social worker, but that is not clearly suggested. It has to be acknowledged that she probably exists as a 'character' only because in 1999 Noel Polk derived his 'Corrected Text' of The Town from the ribbon typescript in the Faulkner Foundation Collection at the University of Virginia.
In The Town Jabbo Gatewood is the son of Uncle Noon Gatewood, who as a blacksmith shod horses. In a sign of social change, Jabbo becomes an automobile mechanic: "Jabbo was the best mechanic in the county and although he still got drunk and into jail as much as ever, he never stayed longer than just overnight anymore because somebody with an automobile always needed him to pay his fine by morning" (71).
Although the soubriquet applied to Uncle Noon Gatewood in The Town labels him according to the demeaning conventions of Jim Crow culture, he is one of the few Negro businessmen who appear in the fictions. He is the "big and yellow" owner of a "blacksmith shop on the edge of town" (68).
In The Town Mr. Garraway owns the store at Seminary Hill. Gavin Stevens describes him physically as "an old man with an old man's dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles" (328).
Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," The Town doesn't mention the fact.)
Despite her title, "Miss Elma" in The Town is the widow of the previous county sheriff who now works as the "office deputy" for Sheriff Hub Hampton (183).
Jack Crenshaw is "the Revenue field agent that did the moonshine still hunting in our district" who calls the sheriff about Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio in The Town (182).
Gavin Stevens' janitor in The Town is named Clefus. Charles Mallison speculates about how pleasantly surprised he was when he came in "to sweep the office" and found the whiskey toddy Gavin had left untouched on his desk (376).
