Mrs. Armstid gets the "bits of cloth" for the "fancy objects" she weaves to supplement the family's meager income from people whom the narrative refers to as "the women in Jefferson" (142). The implication is that they see her as an object of charity, but that is not spelled out.
The itinerant sewing machine salesman named, in this story, simply Suratt is one of Faulkner's favorite characters. He is typically "V.K. Suratt" in his earliest appearances in the Yoknapatawpha fictions; in later fictions, including the revised version of this story in The Hamlet, he is V.K. Ratliff. In some fictions, as here, he travels on a "buckboard" wagon drawn by a "sturdy mismatched team" of horses (138); in others, he drives a small truck.
In this story Vernon Tull is "a well-to-do bachelor" (142) who can cover the note for "one thousand dollars" with which he buys a one-third share of the Old Frenchman's place (149). He accepts the way Flem has fooled him and his two partners with a kind of philosophical detachment. (When Faulkner revised the events of this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he replaced Tull with a character named Odum Bookwright.)
Flem Snopes is one of the central figures in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His rise from share cropper's son to bank president, from cabin to mansion, provides the three novels of the Snopes trilogy with their central story, and Faulkner with a symbol of the worst aspects of the new South. The events of "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" form a pivotal moment in that story: Flem's ability to con Suratt provides him with a point of entry to Jefferson, the deed to half of a restaurant in town.
Henry Armstid tries to make a living from "a small mortgaged farm" (142), but despite the best efforts of his wife he has not been successful at it. There is a kind of desperate violence in his determination to find the Old Frenchman's buried treasure, a monomania that persists long after his two partners have realized that the treasure is not there.
The long-suffering wife of Henry Armstid is not given a first name in this story; elsewhere she is either Lula or Martha. She is hard-working (even taking a turn helping to pull the plow after a mule died) and extremely loyal to her husband, or at least to her wifely duties, although Henry does not hesitate to sign away the "new stove" (150) which was bought with the money she "eked out by weaving by the firelight after dark" (142). She is described as "a woman in a gray shapeless garment and a faded sunbonnet" (137).
"Uncle Dick" is "a shriveled little old man . . . with a long white beard" (144). He wears "a filthy frock coat," lives in "a mud-daubed hut" in a swamp, and is reputed to eat "frogs and snakes [and] bugs as well" (144). He "cares nothing about money" (146), but makes a living of some kind making and selling "nostrums and charms" (144). Suratt hires him to dowse the garden at the Old Frenchman's place, which he does successfully using a spent cartridge containing a "gold-filled human tooth" dangling from "forked peach branch" (145).
Eustace Grimm is "a youngish man . . . in overalls, with a snuff stick in his mouth" (147). He lives in "the adjoining county" (147), but is an "in-law or something" that makes him "kin to them Snopeses" (150) - a piece of data that Suratt and Tull don't remember until too late. Grimm appears interested in purchasing the Old Frenchman's place, but that is probably part of the con game that Flem is running on the treasure seekers. He may also be person whom the seekers hear riding away from the Frenchman's garden in the middle of the night.
Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140).
