Unnamed Poor Whites in Tidewater

In Absalom!, among the plantations in Tidewater Virginia live "other whites like" the Sutpens, who "live in other cabins" that are shabbier than the whitewashed cabins in "the slave quarters" (185). Sutpen's sisters and "the other white women of their kind" look at slaves passing in the road "with a kind of speculative antagonism"; when these women talk, their voices are "dark and sullen" (186). The men express their resentments through racial violence; Sutpen pictures a group of them, including his father, as a set of "fierce hysterical faces" beating a slave amid "the torch-disturbed darkness" of a woods (187).