In The Hamlet it is the courthouse janitor who "opens the court-room" for Mink Snopes' trial and, according to the narrator, could have done as good a job defending Mink his court-appointed lawyer (367).
According to the narrator of The Hamlet, "county officers do not bother [the people of Frenchman's Bend] at all save in the heel of election years" (5). The reference is to 'peace officers,' i.e. policemen, though in Yoknapatawpha the term 'police' is rarely used to describe the county's sheriffs and deputies or the marshals in the town. The county sheriffs all are elected, which explains the last part of that quotation, but in fact the novel shows them doing their job in Frenchman's Bend, at least when Houston is murdered.
As the Sheriff and his deputies take Mink to jail in The Hamlet, they see "cotton pickers" working the fields around Whiteleaf store (283); though they are not described, it's likely that the pickers are black.
These are the prisoners in The Hamlet who had been sentenced to "south Mississippi convict camp" (244) in The Hamlet. They are hired "from the State for the price of their board and keep" (262). As convicts, they are forced to work without pay. (Convict labor was once a common part of the penal system in the South.)
The University of Mississippi "classics professor" for whom Labove did menial work in The Hamlet rewarded him with "an original Horace and a Thucydides" (122).
In The Hamlet Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).
The children of the farmer from whom Ike Snopes steals feed in The Hamlet have grown up and gone off to pursue a wide range of different careers: "professional nurse, ward heeler, city barber, prostitute" (211).
