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, the narrative mentions two who come by later that evening, including this "youth in a battered ford" who drives by to pick up "the girl Frankie" (193).
As part of the narrative's biographical sketch of the "son of a carpenter" whom Belle Mitchell "makes a poet" (181), we learn that he got his job "on a Texas newspaper" when the "besotted young man" who held the position resigned it to "enlist in the Marine Corps early in '17" - i.e. 1917, when the U.S. entered the First World War (182).
From the little the narrative says about them, it seems that the law practice that Horace Benbow inherits from his father Will serves mainly if not exclusively the aristocracy of Yoknapatawpha. He meets "conferees" "across pleasant dinner tables or upon golf links or . . . upon tennis courts"; he conserves the will's of "testators" who spend their lives "in black silk and lace caps" (179).
Loosh Peabody married a woman he "courted for fourteen years before he was able to marry her" (400). She lived somewhere "forty miles" away from Jefferson, outside Yoknapatawpha, and the demands of his patients meant that Peabody could not even see her as often as once a year. We can infer she is patient and loyal, but all the narrative says is that her "only child" is Lucius Peabody, Jr.
Dr. Brandt shares his Memphis office with at least one other medical "specialist," who is described as "large," "with a majestic, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker" (246).
In its brief account of Horace's term as a Rhodes Scholar in England, the narrative mentions the "fellow-countrymen" with whom he occasionally travels on the "Continent" (177).
This is the man whom Montgomery Ward Snopes cons into declaring medically unfit for military service by holding "a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit" all the way from Jefferson to Memphis (167).
On rainy days, the narrator says, the "city fathers," the old men who hold various patronage jobs in the town or county government, "move inside [the courthouse] to the circuit clerk's office" (161).
After Aunt Sally asks Horace about "your Snopes" (the man who went to France with Horace), the narrator describes briefly the "seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman's Bend" (166). Led by Flem, they have "spread" and "multiplied and flourished" in Jefferson (167). Snopeses and "Snopesism" play a major role in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group. In Flags in the Dust only Bryon Snopes figures in the narrative.
