The enslaved man in Absalom! who holds the reins of Sutpen's horse when he dismounts at the Holston House is identified simply as "the negro hostler" (34). A hostler is someone who tends to the horses of people staying at an inn or hotel.
Historically, Haitian slavery was abolished and French ownership of land forbidden by law before Sutpen was born. Absalom! represents the people who rise up against the rule of the French sugar planter so symbolically that it is impossible to know if it sees them as enslaved or not, though it's likely that in Faulkner's mind their uprising is a slave rebellion. Before the rebellion they are depicted as the unseen sound of "the drums and the chanting" at night (202), and a "blank wall of black secret faces, a wall behind which almost anything could be preparing to happen" (203).
In Absalom! this "negro groom" accompanies Henry Sutpen to college as his personal servant (77). Among his duties is carrying letters back and forth between Oxford and Sutpen's Hundred, and it is presumably he who at the beginning of the Civil War "steals into the quarters by night" to give "Judith's maid" Henry's final letter to Judith (273).
In Absalom!, this is the "extra" slave on the carriage when Sutpen's wife and daughter travel to Memphis (81). Among his duties is periodically re-heating the bricks that warm the ladies' feet.
Once the Sutpen family reaches the eastern part of Virginia on their journey in Absalom!, they begin seeing many enslaved people, described by the narrative as "niggers working in the fields" (182), "regiments of niggers [who] planted and raised" crops (184), "still more niggers [who] plant flowers and trim grass" on the grounds of the big plantation houses (185). The narrative describes these slaves as wearing "better clothes" than the Southern poor white population, which includes the Sutpens (186).
In Mr. Compson's account in Absalom! of the place in New Orleans where young women are purchased as sexual slaves, these "old women" serve as their duennas while they await sale (89).
In Absalom! the "stableboy" who drives Ellen and her children to church "instead of the wild negro" who originally took them is not one of the twenty that Sutpen brought with him from the Caribbean, but a slave "that he had bought" locally (17).
The "wild negro who drives" Sutpen's carriage to church in Absalom! is one of the original twenty who were brought from the Caribbean (16). He has a "perfectly inscrutable" face, and speaks a form of pigdin English ("Marster say; I do," 17)
In New Orleans, according to Mr. Compson's account in Absalom!, Bon takes Henry to a place where mixed-race slave women are sold as mistresses: "a row of faces like a bazaar of flowers, the supreme apotheosis of chattelry, of human flesh bred of the two races" to be sold as sexual objects (89).
The Tidewater slave who drives the carriage that almost runs down Sutpen's sister in Absalom! wears "a plug hat"; he orders the "gal" to "git outen de way" (187).
