This is the "someone (not General Compson)" in Absalom! who is in Jefferson in 1833 on the day Sutpen arrives and who looks into his covered wagon to see what or who is there (27).
This is one of the two sets of "half-breed servants" on the Haitian sugar plantation where Sutpen puts down the slave rebellion in Absalom! (199). It represents the "two women servants" (204) who are shut up inside the plantation house during the rebellion (also referred to as "a few frightened half-breed servants," 199). They help load the muskets with which Sutpen and the planter try to defend the house.
The son Sutpen wants is only one of the two boys at the heart of his "design" in Absalom!. The other is referred to as "the boy-symbol at the door," another poor white child like the boy he himself once was in Tidewater, an "amazed and desperate child" whom he will take inside the front door of his big mansion and so "rive forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were" (210).
Pettibone is the only one of the characters, black or white, who appear in the Tidewater section of Absalom! who is named, and in his case the name is an adjective rather than a noun: Sutpen's father comes home one night boasting that "we" - he and other poor white men - "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (187). The whole passage suggests that "Pettibone" himself is the owner of a plantation near the one that Sutpen works on.
In Absalom! Jim Hamblett is the "justice" in the courthouse when Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned for fighting at the "negro ball" (164). In the middle of scolding the prisoner as "a white man" for stirring up racial ill-will at the time that the South seeks "to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor," he suddenly stops to ask the prisoner: "What are you?" (165).
Rosa Coldfield's mother (and Goodhue's wife) is barely mentioned in Absalom!, though we know she was "at least forty" when she died giving birth to Rosa (46).
Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first.
Goodhue Coldfield's mother is an elusive character. Absalom! several times asserts that Rosa Coldfield's childhood was spent in a household consisting of her father and her aunt, but in one passage it refers to the fact that Mr. Coldfield had to support "a dependent mother" as well as his family (32).
Goodhue Coldfield's grandfather never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen by noting that her father knew "who his grandfather had been in Virginia" (11).
