After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). The black teachers in the school (along with their students) are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). Linda's plan would "send" these same black teachers "North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are" - meanwhile replacing them in the school in Jefferson with white teachers (250).
In The Mansion this "senior woman teacher" in Jefferson's Negro school seconds the principal as he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247).
After Linda surrenders her attempt to improve Jefferson's black schools in The Mansion, she meets with "a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches" (254).
The first time that Linda goes into "the Negro grammar and high school" in The Mansion (246), this "alarmed messenger" is sent to tell the principal (247).
While he's in Memphis in The Mansion, Mink goes into a "dingy store" where he sees a "Negro man" who seems to be "running it" and "maybe he even owned it": after all his time in prison Mink wonders if "the new laws" mean a black man "could even own a store" (319).
In The Mansion this man was "bred up on an Arkansas plantation" before becoming a American soldier during World War II (306). He is "new" to the Army when his commander leaves him in a foxhole near the Japanese enemy somewhere in Malaya; before he can be relieved or reinforced, he is killed and beheaded (306).
After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). Like their teachers, these children are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246).
Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not.
