For some reason that The Hamlet does not provide, this "white man" chases a Negro across the platform at a "bleak" train station and shoots him "in the body with a blunt pistol" (138).
"Africa" is mentioned three times in The Hamlet. The first two locate "Africa" in the context of European colonialism. When Ratliff visits Columbia, Tennessee, and discovers that it is an untouched market for selling his sewing machines, his joy is compared to the feelings of "the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory" (61).
When Ratliff discovers a previously uncanvassed territory in Tennessee for selling sewing machines, either his imagination or the narrator's fetches a comparison from the other side of the world: Ratliff looks about him "with something of the happy surmise of the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory" (61).
When in The Hamlet Ratliff discovers a previously uncanvassed territory in Tennessee for selling sewing machines, either his imagination or the narrator's fetches a comparison from the other side of the world: Ratliff looks about him "with something of the happy surmise of the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory" (61). It seems worth noting that this is one of the few times Faulkner's imagination visits Africa, and also that in this imagined event no Africans are present.
In The Hamlet, a few days after Hoake McCarron's father is "shot in a gambling house," a rumor arises that "a woman had shot him" (150). No evidence is given to support the rumor, but if it's true, then the context makes it likely that she is a prostitute.
The University of Mississippi opened in 1848, and became co-educational in 1882. According to The Hamlet, the male and female students who are there with Labove generally ignore him.
The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).
These are the two young men, among the larger group of young men in The Hamlet who court Eula Varner, who flee when it is discovered that she is pregnant. The narrative confers on them a particularly Faulknerian - which is to say, negatively defined - distinction: "By fleeing too [along with McCarron, who actually had sex with Eula], they put in a final and despairing bid for . . . the glorious shame of the ruin they did not do" (156).