One of the most important characters in Absalom, Absalom! is referred to only by the unfortunate label of "monkey nigger" (186, 188, 189) or "the monkey-dressed nigger butler" (187). This is the slave of the planter for whom Sutpen's father works, and who, when Sutpen comes to the front door of the plantation's big house with a message, "keeps the door barred with his body" (187) and tells the white boy "never to come to the front door again but to go around to the back" (188).
Shreve and Quentin speculate in Absalom! that as an incentive to get Bon to attend the University of Mississippi, the lawyer offers to "buy him an extra special body servant" to take along (250); later they depict this "new extra nigger" unpacking Bon's "fine clothes" in his stateroom on the riverboat taking him to college (252).
While he lies outside his big house "in a barrel stave hammock . . . with his shoes off," the owner of the plantation on which Sutpen's father works in Absalom! is waited on by a slave "who wore every day better clothes than [Sutpen] or his father and sisters had ever owned"; this slave's task is "to fan" the owner "and bring him drinks" (184). It is possible that this is the same man as the enslaved "butler" who tells Sutpen later to go around to the mansion's back door (187), but that is not indicated in the text.
In Absalom! Shreve describes the people who shop at the "little crossroads store" that Sutpen opens after the Civil War as "a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash)" (147). As at other country stores in Faulkner's world, there are often "lounging men" on the front porch, but here the "customers and loungers" are racially mixed: "rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes" (149), "the black and the white" (227).
In Absalom! Rosa's description of the way Sutpen used to race with other carriages to church mentions in passing the "women and children [who] scattered and screamed" when the teams thundered up to the church door (17), and two different sets of men: the ones who "catch at the bridles" of the "other team" (17) and the other men who join in the racing, who "aid and abet" Sutpen (16).
Several real Confederate officers are mentioned by name in Absalom!. They have their own entries. This entry represents the larger, anonymous group of men who lead the Confederate Army through the Civil War. Like so many other characters in the novel, they are seen differently from different points of view. In Chapter 1, to Rosa Coldfield, who writes "poems, ode eulogy and epitaph" to many of them, they are "a few figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" (13).
In Absalom!, this is the "driver" of the "ambulance" that Rosa takes out to the Sutpen place at the end of 1909, to bring Henry into town "where the doctors could save him" (299).
