This "old lady, dead now" is called a "spinster" by the narrator. She was "a neighbor" of Chick Mallison, who baked treats for "all the children on the street" and taught them to play a card game that she made sure she won (58).
The white children of Jefferson don't directly appear anywhere in the story, but Chick thinks of them three times. He remembers when he and the other "children on [his] street" played a card game with "an old lady" who lived nearby (58). And he notes the absence of the children who should have been on their porches on Sunday morning, "fresh and scrubbed for Sunday school with clutched palm-sweaty nickels" - but "perhaps by mutual consent" Sunday school has been cancelled (38).
The Negro servants who work for the white population of Jefferson are almost completely invisible in the novel. This is by their own actions: anxious about what might happen after Lucas is arrested for killing a white man, they stop going outside, even to work. But their absence provokes two descriptions of who they are, or at least what they look like, under conventional circumstances. On Sunday morning Chick imagines the "housemaids or cooks in their fresh Sunday aprons" on the porches of their employers' homes (38).
We only hear the voice of this "young man" in the car that circles the Square on Sunday night: "no words, not even a shout: a squall significant and meaningless" (48).
As seen from Chick's perspective, the white people who go to the churches in Jefferson on Sunday morning are "men in their dark suits and women in silks and parasols and girls and young men two and two, flowing and decorous" (41).
"A shoestring timber-buyer from over in Crossman County" (102), Jake Montgomery is involved in the lumber-harvesting business with Vinson and Crawford Gowrie. The son of a farmer, his checkered past includes running a roadhouse in Tennessee that is shut down by the police. Even as a corpse he gets around.
While driving under the influence through Jefferson, this "city man" crashes his expensive car into one of the stores on the Square (53). He treats his time in jail as an adventure, and tries to get the town to sell him the jail's antique "handhewn" door and hardware (53).
The daughter of the man who was the county jailer in 1864 is the heroine of a romantic vignette. Struck by the appearance of a "ragged unshaven lieutenant" who is leading a defeated Confederate unit past the jail, this "young girl of that time" writes her name with a diamond in "one of the panes of the fanlight beside the door"; "six months later" they are married (49).
"The ragged unshaven lieutenant who leads the broken companies" of the Confederate brigade that has to retreat through Jefferson after losing a battle outside the town in 1864 (49). His appearance catches the eye of the jailer's daughter, who marries him "six months later" (49).
