On their way to the Edmonds place in the morning of "the first winter cold-snap" (4), Chick and Aleck Sander pass small farms where everyone seems to be involved in the same two activities. The women, wearing "sunbonnets" or "men's old felt hats," are boiling water in big kettles, while the men, "with crokersack aprons tied with wire over their overalls," prepare to slaughter hogs (4). (A croker sack is a burlap bag.)
According to Gavin Stevens, the person who intends to buy the lumber that the Gowrie's are harvesting - "the lumber's ultimate consignee" (223) - lives in Memphis.
Gavin Stevens describes seeing "[Sheriff] Hampton's cook" sitting in his kitchen eating greens with Lucas Beauchamp (219). Gavin does not describe the cook at all, but it seems safe to assume that she is a Negro woman; for one reason, all the cooks in the Yoknapatawpha fiction are, and for another, she is eating at the same table as Lucas. Earlier Gavin calls her "a hired town cook," who gets to the Sheriff's house "at a decent hour about eight" (106).
The crew who work in the sawmill where trees from Sudley Workitt's land are turned into lumber are "hired by the day" (219). They are almost certainly not the same men as the "three youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" (18). The two sawmills are close enough in space, but not in time: that earlier group appears three years before the Gowrie's begin harvesting Workitt's timber.
These three "youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" are all "a little drunk" in Fraser's store when Lucas Beauchamp enters (18). One of them, with "a reputation for brawling and violence," is more than a little racist: he goes after Lucas for his attitude, calling him "biggity" among other names (18, 19). (This crew is probably entirely different from the "[saw]mill crew" who are hired three years later by the Vinson and Crawford Gowrie.)
The man who owns the timber that Vinson and Crawford Gowrie are harvesting is first referred to as "Uncle Sudley Workitt" (215), and later identified as the boys' mother's "second or fourth cousin or uncle or something" (217). He is described as "an old rheumatic man" and "half blind" (219).
Boon Hogganbeck's "mother's mother" was a "Chickasaw woman" (91). Boon and his Chickasaw grandmother are mentioned in a number of Faulkner texts, but the only mention of his mother in the fictions is the passing acknowledgment paid her in this phrase.
The anonymous "Chickasaw chief" who, in this novel, is Sam Fathers' father is identified in other Yoknapatawpha texts as Ikkemotubbe, who led the tribe when the first white settlers came into the area (91).
In this novel's brief reference to Sam Fathers, the narrator refers to him as "the Negro Sam Fathers whose father had been a Chickasaw chief" (91). In the earlier novel Go Down, Moses, however, where Sam is a major figure in Ike McCaslin's life, the narrator says his mother was "a quadroon," which means only one of his eight great-grandparents was black. In any case, by the racial laws of Yoknapatawpha, written and unwritten, any African American ancestor makes him a "Negro" rather than "white" or "Indian."
