The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Major de Spain's house servant in "Barn Burning" is "an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a linen jacket" (11). He tries to prevent Ab Snopes from entering the de Spain mansion, and then - unsuccessfully - orders Ab to "Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here. Major ain't home nohow" (11). At the end of the story, when Sarty bursts into the mansion to warn Major de Spain, this house servant is the first person that he encounters.

Major de Spain's wife. In Sarty's eyes she is "a lady," "in a gray, smooth gown with lace at the throat," though she is also a housewife: over the gown she wears an "apron tied at the waist," and she is "wiping cake or biscuit dough from her hands with a towel" (11-12). She is furious when Ab Snopes ruins her rug.

Major de Spain is the Yoknapatawpha land-owner who contracts with Abner Snopes to work on his property as a tenant farmer. The De Spains are another of Yoknapatawpha's aristocratic families, and at least one "Major de Spain" appears or is mentioned in over a dozen works. Figuring out the de Spain lineage, however, is almost impossible. This Major de Spain is probably the man who actually was a Confederate Major during the Civil War.

A young African American man whom Abner Snopes sends to Mr. Harris to tell him that "wood and hay kin burn" (4) - Ab's barely disguised way of threatening to burn Harris' barn. This messenger never appears directly. In his testimony against Ab, Harris calls him a "strange nigger" (4), a term that in the context of the story and the South at that time means he is a black person whom Harris has never seen before.

Lennie is the mother of Flem and three other children, and Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless wife named Vynie in other fictions. Although loyal to Abner, she tries to dissuade him from his vehement and destructive ways. One of the few times she speaks, for example, is when he prepares to ruin the De Spain rug: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14). Lennie is kind in her interactions with Sarty. Her sister's name is Lizzie.

The story's second "Justice of the Peace" also holds court sitting behind a "plank table" in a general store (17). He too is a "man in spectacles" (17). In the civil case he presides over, brought by Ab Snopes against Major de Spain, he decides how much Ab must pay for ruining Mrs. de Spain's rug.

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Abner Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem.  In "Barn Burning," he is a violent man embittered by the (decidedly unheroic) wound he got during the Civil War, when he was shot by "a Confederate provost's man" while trying to steal a horse (5), and by his years as a tenant farmer working for the wealthier white men who own the various fields he farms on shares.  The wound leaves him with a limp.  His experience as a tenant farmer leaves him with a smoldering resentment against his lot in life and the southern caste system that peri

Mr. Harris is a farmer brings Ab Snopes to trial after a dispute between them over a hog leads to the burning of Harris' barn. He is furious with Ab, though shows his capacity for compassion when he decides against forcing Sarty to testify.