In "Monk," the mentally challenged title character is a mystery. Initially known only as "Monk," the narrator characterizes him as a "moron, perhaps even a cretin" (41), using terms offensive to modern readers but common and acceptable during the era of the story's composition. Near the end readers learn that his given name is actually Stonewall Jackson Odlethrop - though it is not clear exactly who gave him any of these names. He is born in the hill country east of Jefferson, presumably the unwanted child of Mrs. Odelethrop's son and a "hard" woman from somewhere else (43).
The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43).
In "Monk," C.L. Gambrell is the warden at the penitentiary. He seems to be a fair, kind man in many respects. He makes Monk a "trusty" (trustee, 49), and Monk follows him with "doglike devotion" (49). However, he also displays a cruel streak when he goads Bill Terrel concerning his pardon. He shows his judgment to be even more questionable when he has an unnamed Negro cook "severely beaten" in an effort to extract information about his missing pistol. Monk later finds the pistol where the warden then "recalls having hid it himself" (53).
According to Absalom!, in the Tidewater area of Virginia these "certain few men" own the fields and the slaves who work in them, and hire the overseers who watch the slaves; they "have the power of life and death and barter and sale over others" (179).
In Absalom! a "wagon full of strangers moving from Arkansas" to someplace else tries to spend the night in the "rotting shell" of old Sutpen mansion, but flee when "something happened before they could begin to unload the wagon even" (172-73).
In Absalom! these are the twenty "wild blacks" whom Sutpen brings as slaves to Yoknaptawpha in 1833 (4), from a French colony in the Caribbean; the "civilized language" which they speak (44) is "a sort of French" (27). Sutpen has a child - Clytemnestra - with one of the two slaves in this group who are women (48). The narrative repeatedly calls them "wild" (13, 16, etc.), and distinguishes them as a group from the "tame" slaves that Sutpen later acquires, through birth or purchase (17). Rosa characterizes them as being "like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men" (4).
There were thousands of uniformed "United States marshals" in the South during Reconstruction as part of the federal government's efforts to enfranchise and protect the rights of emancipated slaves and to enforce the punishments Congress imposed on former Confederate leaders and soldiers. Their role is Absalom! is described (by Shreve) as only punitive: he refers to the "taxes and levies and penalties" with which they encumber Sutpen's property (146).
According to Absalom!, when Bon and Henry enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1859, the entire student body "numbered in two figures" (81). Included in that number are the "five or six" students, all like Henry "planters' sons," with whom Bon associates (76). It is also this small clique, presumably, who follow Bon's example and switch to the Law School.
