A slave-dealer before the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army when it ended. He was active in the fighting around the Yoknapatawpha area.
One of Lucius McCaslin's twin sons, Theophilus is more typically called "Uncle Buck." Lucius identifies him as "our remote uncle and cousin" and "Cousin Ike's father" who served during the Civil War, fighting under the command of the brother of Nathan Bedford Forrest (94). Elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, it is his twin brother, "Uncle Buddy," who serves in the Civil War; when the brothers competed for the chance to fight in the Confederate Army, Buck lost and stayed in Yoknapatawpha throughout the fighting.
The "street car" conductor the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the motorman (93).
Though their farms are "bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns" than those on the Mississippi side of Hell Creek, the Tennessee country people whom the travelers pass on the broad road that leads to Memphis are also "still in their Sunday clothes," sitting on their front porches ("galleries"), watching the world go by (91). And when they get closer to the city, "even the little children" who live along the road are no longer excited by the sight of a car (92).
The unscrupulous man who cultivates a patch of mud in order to sell his services to mired automobile travelers is not described in much detail. He is "a gaunt man, older than we - I anyway - had assumed" (86).
When they cross the Tallahatchie River, the adventurers are in what Lucius calls "foreign country, another county," the county that adjoins Yoknapatawpha to the north (78). Between Ballenbaugh's and Hell Creek bottom the countryside seems rural: along the road are "sprouting fields" (78). Lucius describes the residents they pass as "the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs . . . running toward the fence" to watch an automobile go by (78).
Mentioned first as "a Negro man" who works for Miss Ballenbaugh (75), Ephum presumably helps her farm, takes care of the horses of the men who stay there, and does other masculine chores around the place. Ned stays overnight at his home, which must be nearby.
Alice cooks for Miss Ballenbaugh, and very well too: after eating her food, Lucius "knows why the hunters and fishermen come back" for it (76). Unmarried, she says she "aint studying no husband" (75).
The typical patrons at Ballenbaugh's in its modern iteration are described as "fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen" who return "not for the hunting and fishing but for the table that Miss Ballenbaugh set" (74).
