When Young Anse moves "back into the hills" in "Smoke," the “neighbors and strangers” in that most rural part of Yoknapatawpha leave him "severely alone" (6).
Nothing definite is said in "Smoke" about the "child" in Battenburg who was run down by the man hired to kill Judge Dunkenfield (31), but based on the fact that narrator doesn't specify race and the aggressive reaction of the people who arrest the driver, this child was presumably white.
Mr. Mardis is the father Cornelia Mardis. He owns two thousand acres of the finest farming land in Yoknapatawpha. The "five generations" of Mardises in the family cemetery suggest how long his people have been in Yoknapatawpha (8), though the family doesn't appear elsewhere in the fictions. On his death, Mr. Mardis leaves his property to his daughter, rather than to her husband, Anselm Holland.
In "Smoke," Emma Dukinfield is Judge Dukinfield’s daughter. She herself doesn't appear in the story, but the "small, curiously chased brass box" (25) that she brings back from Europe as a present for him plays a crucial role in solving the Judge's murder.
In "Smoke" Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words.
While describing the ruins of the graveyard at the Old Frenchman's place, the story refers to the slaves buried there as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136). This reference re-frames the narrative in both time and space, shifting it briefly from Yoknapatawpha in the present (the 1890s) and the past (the antebellum era of slavery) to the New York City of the 1920s, by which time large numbers of southern blacks had moved to the urban North and when jazz music was in vogue among both white and black audiences.
In both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, these women help Mrs. Armstid cope with her circumstances by giving her materials - "string saved from packages and bits of cloth" to weave into "fancy objects" she can sell ("Lizards," 142) . In The Hamlet Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" (360).
According to "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard": "For sixty years three generations of sons and grandsons" have snuck onto the abandoned Frenchman's place at night, digging into its dirt in search of "the gold and the silver, the money and the plate" that was reputedly hidden there during the Civil War (136). Nothing has ever been found.
