Before the Civil War the Frenchman place was not "old," but a large slave plantation. None of the slaves are given an individual identity in the narrative, but it does say that they "raised cotton" before the War and "buried" the Frenchman's gold to hide it from Yankees during the War, and they would also have provided the labor for the Frenchman to "straighten the river bed" to reclaim the land for producing cotton (136). Apparently some of them are buried in the Frenchman's graveyard, though none of their descendants remain in Frenchman's Bend.
According to the narrator, the "huge house" and the "formal grounds and gardens" at the Frenchman's place were designed by an "imported English architect" (136). In Flags in the Dust the Benbow house in Jefferson was also designed in the 1840s by an English architect, though not necessarily the same one.
At almost any time of day, apparently, the porch in front of Varner's store serves as the gathering place for groups of men from nearby farms. There they discuss local events and characters.
The fascinated "spectators" who gather every day to watch Henry Armstid come from as far away as "ten miles" (137, 136). The narrator calls them "the men, the women, the young and the old," and describes them mainly by the clothes they wear: "overalls and awkward gingham" (135). Some of them, too, have "lips full of snuff" (136-7).
Here identified only as Lon Quick's "boy" (147) and never present in person, in As I Lay Dying Quick's son is named Lon too. There is no indication about his age, though he is old enough to recognize Suratt's horses.
Lon Quick appears in several of Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend stories; in this one he is reported to have said that "his boy" has spotted Suratt's "team hid out in the bottom below Armstid's" (147). He himself doesn't appear in the narrative.
The narrative says that Suratt owns "half of a restaurant" in Jefferson (150). The other half is owned by "his brother-in-law" (141) - which is all we know about this man. (The earlier "Centaur in Brass" said even less about this half-owner. In the later novel The Hamlet this brother-in-law is named Aaron Rideout.)
"The principal landowner" in Frenchman's Bend (136), Will Varner appears in a number of Yoknapatawpha fictions. In this story he is only mentioned, as at least the nominal owner of the country store and the temporary owner of the Old Frenchman's place. The narrator describes him as "a politician, a veterinary, a Methodist lay preacher" (139). (He appears or is mentioned in 9 Yoknapatawpha fictions, in 2 of them as "Uncle Billy," and in 7 as "Will.")
The man who built "the Old Frenchman's place" as one of the earliest plantations in Yoknapatawpha history is not named in this story; in other texts he is identified as Louis Grenier.
