Lucius describes the men who crowd around the race track and bet on the races as "the same overalls, tieless, the sweated hats, the chewing tobacco" that he associated with the men in the hotel dining room that morning (227). But a major difference is that this crowd is racially unsegregated: "people, black and white" (228). One member of this crowd leads Lightning to the starting line after Ned is disqualified. "People" could imply women, of course, but until Minnie arrives at the end of the third race, there is no evidence of them at the track.
In an aside to his grandson about "that Cause" - i.e. the Civil War - Lucius refers to "your spinster aunts," and differentiates his idea about the War from theirs (228). Elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, such women are identified with a refusal to surrender the 'Lost Cause,' or admit either defeat or the flaws of the Old South, but what they stand for here is not clear.
During the Civil War, Sherman served as a General in the Union army. He was best known (and in the South, reviled) for his 'March to the Sea' through Georgia and the Carolinas near the end of the War.
Wade Hampton fought with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He was a brigadier general during the fighting at "Gaine's Mill" in 1862 (278).
Lucius briefly describes his Grandfather's father as a Confederate "color sergeant" who was shot and killed during the fighting in Virginia in 1862 (285). The fact that he was a sergeant rather than a commissioned officer complicates the question of the family's class status. When, for example, Lucius earlier discusses how his great-grandmother, this man's wife, taught his grandfather how to behave as a gentleman, it seems to imply an upper class background (200) - but in Faulkner such a background usually translates into a higher military rank than sergeant.
Lucius notes that "Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the [school] work" he missed while having his adventure in Tennessee (296). She is obviously his teacher.
Boon and Everbe (as Lucius calls Miss Corrie through the second half of the story) have a child at the end of the novel. Lucius says he is "already as ugly as Boon," but that is before he learns that the boy has been named after him: Lucius Priest Hogganbeck (298).
Henry Ford's name was almost synonymous with automobile during the early decades of the 20th century. The Model T Ford, which he introduced in 1908, brought owning a car within the reach of average Americans - though Grandfather Priest's car is a much more aristocratic make and model.
