If there is something demeaning about the way so many characters refer to him as "Uncle Possum," Parsham Hood is one of Faulkner's more impressive black characters. His clothes and facial hair make him look like a white planter or a southern "colonel": upon first meeting him Lucius describes him as "an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial [beard]" (164). At another point Lucius says his appearance is "even regal" (218).
"A pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen" (162), Lycurgus is the grandson of Uncle Parsham Hood. Hood's daughter Mary is his mother; the narrative never mentions the man named Briggins who is his father. A very polite young man, he even refers to Ned as "Mr. McCaslin," confusing Lucius, who obviously assumes he must be speaking about a white man (222).
The driver of the Stanley Steamer that arrives in Parsham to carry Boon and the others back to jail in Hardwick is driven by "another deputy," or at least someone "in a badge" (253).
As Ned puts it, the Parsham constable, Mr. Poleymus, "may be little, and he may be old; but he's a man, mon" (251). Ned admires the way he takes care of his wife, who has had a stroke, washing and feeding her. He also sorts out the various characters and their doings with a clear sense of humanity and justice.
Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns Coppermine (i.e. Lightning).
The "groom" who leads the skittish horse Acheron up to the starting line is not described (230). We assume that he is 'black,' like McWillie and the other man who works in Linscomb's stable, but typically Faulkner's fiction will specify race when a character is not white, so it is certainly possible that Faulkner imagined him as 'white.'
The "steward and marshal" at the races is a local "dog trainer" and hunter who is out on bail awaiting trial for "a homicide which had occurred last winter at a neighboring whiskey still" (229).
One of the two judges at the race is named "Ed" (260). We are assuming he is the judge who is first referred to only as "the night telegraph operator at the depot" (229), but it's just as possible that the first name of Mr. McDiarmid, the other judge, is Ed.
Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the race. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).
