Mentioned only briefly, when the narrator sums up Joan Heppleton's life, the man who is both her and Belle Mitchell's father is identified with the quality of "bitter reserve" (322).
"The group of Belle's more intimate familiars" who attend Little Belle's recital seem a bit older than the young set that gathers at the Mitchells' tennis court (198), but the narrator does not characterize them with any more sympathy. The group is dominated by the voices of the "ladies," "sibilantly crescendic," "an hysterical tideflux" (198). The "occasional soberly clad male" remains at the periphery of this "chattering" (198) and "gabbling" (202).
"Each spring" a "certain few young girls" are allowed to pick flowers from the lawn at the Benbow house (164). Since they "ask permission" we can infer that they are polite (164). Their class status can be inferred from the first two adjectives that the narrator uses to describe them.
"A negro lad" serves a car that pulls up to the curb outside the drugstore (274). Presumably he fetches something from the soda fountain inside the store, but that is not specified.
When Bayard drives north to the university town where his passengers will serenade the women students, they go through the "streets identical with those at home" (142) - which may be Faulkner's covert way of acknowledging that Jefferson is based closely on Oxford, where he is writing the novel. When the car reaches "an identical square," "people on the square" turn to look at the car, with three young white men in front and three black musicians in back, "curiously" (142). That reaction, however, is all that we learn about the people who live in Oxford.
This icon represents the other passengers who ride on the trains that, for example, bring Horace back to Jefferson or take Jenny and Old Bayard to Memphis. In the second instance we are told that some of the people "in the car" knew the Sartorises, but otherwise they are not individuated (245). (Under the Jim Crow laws, Negroes were not allowed on the same cars as whites.)
The men who own businesses or have offices or work in stores on the Square appear several times, specifically separated out from the larger population of Jefferson. They most frequently are associated with either Old Bayard or Jenny Du Pre.
Cotton is the main crop of Yoknapatawpha, and as Flags in the Dust points out, it is raised by two very different kinds of growers - planters or croppers - on two very different kinds of land: the "other planters further up the valley" from the Sartorises own the county's rich bottom land, while the "smaller croppers" have to manage "with their tilted fields among the hills" (289).
Will Falls distributes the "pint of whisky" that is always part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas gift baskets given him by the Sartorises "among his ancient and homeless cronies" (301) in the county poorhouse.
Harry Mitchell describes the set who congregate around his wife as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). They seem to be just a few years younger than Horace or Bayard. In addition to the ones who play tennis with Horace, the narrative mentions two who "drop in" later that evening, including one who is simply referred to as "another young man" who plays tennis (193).
