The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

According to Ratliff, the "Negro" Manfred de Spain hires to drive him as President of the bank wears a "white coat and a showfer's cap" (174).

The "Negro coachman" drives Colonel Sartoris to the bank every day in a "linen duster and one of the Colonel's old plug hats" (174). This "coachman" is not named in The Mansion, but the details - duster and plug hat - are clear signs that Faulkner is thinking of him as Simon Strother, the coachman who drives Sartoris to and from the bank in Flags in the Dust.

This "Memphis expert" tells Flem and Eula what a bank vice-president's house should be furnished with; there is no indication of the expert's gender in this novel, but in The Town she is identified as a woman (173).

The "man" from whom Flem buys his automobile - either a salesman or a dealer - tells Flem he has to drive his car at least once a month to "keep the battery up" (172).

This is the black man who works for Flem Snopes. In his narrative Ratliff calls him both the "yard boy" (172) and "the yard man" (173), "that Negro yard man" (182). Given Ratliff's dialect and the white Southern use of "boy" to keep black men in the place that segregation defines for them, it's safe to say this "boy" is really a "man." In addition to his work around and outside Flem's mansion, he drives Flem's car "now and then" (172), though Ratliff notes that "he never had no white coat and showfer's [i.e. chauffeur's] cap" (174).

One of the two black servants who work for Flem in his mansion is referred to as the "Negro cook" (172). She is referred to by several characters and the narrator, and she passes close to Mink in the dark as she leaves the mansion to go home, but she is never described.

When Watkins Snopes enlarges the de Spain house into "the mansion" for Flem, his construction crew consists of "kinfolks and in-laws" (171).

Doc Meeks himself does not appear in the novel, but the "patent medicine truck" he drives around Yoknapatawpha advertises "Watkins Products" - a real manufacturer of health medicines that has been in business since just after the Civil War - on "both [its] sides and the back" (171). The novel describes those advertisements as the source of Watkins Products Snopes' name.

Another Snopes who appears for the first time in the last novel of the Snopes trilogy, Watkins Products Snopes is the carpenter and kinsman whom Flem hires to renovate the house that was formerly owned by Manfred de Spain; it is Wat's work, along with Flem's ambitions, that create 'the mansion' of the novel's title. He is named for a real company that has sold health products since 1868. His exact relationship to Flem or any of the other Snopeses is never specified.

Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children" are sent back to Jefferson and end up wreaking havoc (327). That story is told in detail in The Town, where they are somewhat more clearly individualized: one, probably the oldest, is a girl, two are boys, while no one is sure about the sex of the youngest.