Confederate Buzzards

"Rage Gage didn't like cutting hair up underneath no bunch of buzzards. Especially buzzards named after white men. He wondered why the scientists down in Jackson couldn't be naming a few buzzards after colored people. Ain't like they don't have plenty of buzzards to go around. Half them buzzards ain't even got a name. That's the truth (90-91)."

The recurrence of the buzzards in this story struck me as odd in our first reading, and this scene in Rage Gage's barbershop confirmed that there has to be something more to the scavenging birds than eating dead armadillos. To me, there is a connection between the buzzards and the white people, specifically the original Confederate soldiers whose corpses drew them into Mississippi in the first place. The birds are described as "part of the glorious history of the South (68)", just as Confederate soldiers are, and some of them are said to be so old that they are actually the same birds who feasted on the dead soldiers. I find this detail important because it gives the reader an idea that the soldiers who fought to defend slavery are still around, at least in spirit, and the next description of the younger birds who wander aimlessly in the world, longing for freedom and purpose that their ancestors had, could be compared to the descendants of old white Southerners who still have trouble finding a place in the modernized and, in some places, racially integrated world. I think that Rage Gage has the same feeling about the buzzards, and it doesn't help that half of them are named after white government representatives of Mississippi. Rather than naming the other half after black people, as Rage Gage suggests, I feel like the rest of the buzzards represent the poor white class who have no better standards of living than their black neighbors, but who continue to loom over places like Rage Gage's barbershop and wait for their chance to assert what power their skin color gives them.

Discussion question: Could the section about the buzzard named Ross Barnett be connected to Solon Gregg's own story as he visits Lord Montberclair? If not, why does it exist?