Trying to find out where Narcissa went after seeing her in town, Horace asks all the clerks "within the radius of where she must have turned" if they've seen her (261).
All we see of the people who live in what the narrative calls "the restricted district" of Memphis through which Red's funeral procession passes are their "faces," which "peer from beneath lowered shades" as it goes by (249). While it is not absolutely clear what "restricted district" refers to, the point of this passage seems to be to juxtapose two worlds in Memphis: the underworld and the respectable (but intimidated) citizenry.
Six "liveried chauffeurs" - all presumably employed by a funeral home - drive the otherwise empty "Packard touring cars" that follow the hearse carrying Red's body to the cemetery (249). The odds are good that Faulkner imagined them as Negroes, like the other drivers and chauffeurs in his fictions, but in this text their race is not specified.
Among the people attending Red's funeral, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.
The "male quartet" hired for Red's funeral from "a vaudeville house" brings "the older women" to tears "singing mother songs" and "Sonny Boy" "in close harmony" (247).
"A thick, muscle-bound, bullet-headed man" wearing a badly fitting dinner jacket (243), the bouncer at the Grotto club is put to work when he tries to remove a rowdy guest at Red's funeral and is attacked by four men. The funeral ends when they crash into the bier and spill Red's body out of the coffin.
"Mourners" is a euphemism. Two of the people in attendance at Red's funeral - "middle-aged women" (246) - are described "weeping quietly," but most seem mainly interested in the free alcohol Gene is providing and in getting the flowers off the crap table so that gambling can resume. They include men in both "dark suits" and "the light, bright shades of spring," and women, the "younger ones" wearing "bright colors" and the older ones "in sober gray and black and navy blue, and glittering with diamonds" (243).
As Gene says, "I aint nothing but a bootlegger," but in tribute to Red he makes sure there's plenty of free liquor at the funeral in Chapter 25. He is described as "a far man in a shapeless greenish suit," with dirty hands, "a greasy black tie" and a very sweaty face (243-44).
The proprietor of the Grotto club, a bald man named only "Joe" (247), lacks culture (he thinks "The Blue Danube" is a blues song, for example, 244), but he does his best to keep Red's funeral as dignified as possible. The people in attendance, however, believe he is trying to keep them from having a good time.
