The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

At a "bleak" train station he is passing through in The Hamlet, Labove witnesses a white man shooting this "negro" (138). Although the Negro seems to be dying, and tells the "white folks" trying to help him that "I awready been shot," when his clothes are pushed aside the bullet that hit him "rolls out . . . bloodless" (139).

This man is a tenant farmer who works land owned by Jack Houston's father. In The Hamlet Jack Houston engages in a relationship with his daughter (228).

This woman is the daughter of one of Jack Houston's father's renters. Jack has a relationship with her. She is "two or three years" his senior (228).

This man in The Hamlet advises another fireman who wants to borrow money from Flem Snopes, though he doesn't seem to understand how much the interest Flem has been charging him for "two years" is costing him (78). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

This is the fireman at Quick's mill in The Hamlet who is told by another to "go to Mr Snopes at the store" to borrow money (78). (This is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

In The Hamlet this man works at Varner's cotton gin, and helps Trumbull overhaul the machinery (65). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

In The Hamlet Ratliff's revulsion at the idea of Eula Varner being married to Flem Snopes leads him to imagine what Flem's idea of sex is; the result is a disturbing image that probably tells us more about Ratliff than about Flem or anyone else: sex as a kind of business transaction with a "black brute from the field with the field sweat still drying on her" (181) who wants "a nickel's worth of lard" from the store (180).

In The Hamlet this farmhand buys the buggy that was used by one of Eula's suitors and drives it through the village "a few times each year" (165).

The Hamlet speculates that "thirty years ago," the people at the Old Frenchman's place learned "the news of Sumter" - that the Civil War had begun - from a "courier" who might have been "a neighbor's slave," riding up to the plantation on a mule that had been "taken out of the plow" (373).

This young black was Hoake McCarron's sole companion growing up. Many of Faulkner's wealthier white men had Negro companions and personal servants as boys; the way this kind of relationship plays out in The Hamlet is atypical, to say the least. When the boys are 6-8 years old, Hoake "conquers the negro with his fists in a fair fight" (150). Later he "pays the negro" at a fixed rate "for the privilege of whipping [him] . . . with a miniature riding crop" (151).