Mrs. Gant is probably the most powerfully drawn character in the story named after her daughter, "Miss Zilphia Gant," just as she is an overwhelming force in Zilphia's life, even long after she is dead.
"Miss Zilphia Gant" begins with Jim Gant, who in its first sentence is described as "a stock trader" (368). The next sentence explains that the stock in this case are "horses and mules," which he sells in the "Memphis markets" (368). He is the father of Miss Zilphia, though he abandons her and her mother when she was a "two-year-old girl" (369), and disappears from the narrative after he and his lover are killed not far from the Memphis markets by his wife, who tracks them down.
In "Smoke" the man who owns and runs the Jefferson drug store is named West. He is instrumental in providing county attorney Gavin Stevens with information concerning the stranger with the taste for "city cigarettes" (28).
In "Smoke," Old Anse is known to be "a ruthless man" in part because of the "tales told about him by both white and negro tenants" (3). These "tenants" are share-croppers who farm parcels of land on the Mardis-Holland property for a portion of the money when the crop is sold.
In "Smoke" this man - referred to by Gavin Stevens only as "a nigger" - reports to Stevens that a "big car was parked in Virginius Holland’s barn the night before Judge Dukinfield was killed" (29).
This man in "Smoke" - referred to only as "a Negro" - tells the authorities about seeing Old Anse "digging up the graves in the cedar grove where five generations of his wife’s people rested" (9).
In "Smoke" the grand jury that sits to hear Gavin's case in the inquiry into Judge Dukinfield’s murder is all-male and -white (in Mississippi at that time, only white males were eligible for jury duty), but presumably were drawn from different classes.
The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary.
In "Monk" the residents of the hill country from which Monk hails are a "clannish people," and fiercely independent. These descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers live in a country "impenetrable and almost uncultivated" where they "intermarried and made whiskey and shot at all strangers from behind log barns and snake fences." The narrator points out that they seem to know "as little about him [Monk] as we did" (43).
