In Flags in the Dust the black man in whose barn Bayard spends Christmas eve tells him that his "brudder-in-law" borrowed his mules, and so Bayard will have to wait for a ride to the next town (365). When the mules "miraculously" appear later on Christmas day, the narrator refers to the "yet uncorporeal brother-in-law" (366) - seeming to imply that the Negro invented him.
"Negress" is not a term the narrator of Flags in the Dust uses for any other female Negro, so it's not clear why he uses it the one time he mentions the black maid at the Beard boarding house. She is helping Mrs. Beard serve breakfast at the boarding house. She is also described as "slatternly" (324).
The men who are under John Sartoris' command in the second story Will Falls tells about the Civil War serve in Mississippi and the surrounding area. Old Bayard says "they were all pretty good men in those days," but adds that they "quit fighting and went home too often" (229). Jenny calls them "a bunch of red-neck brigands" (238). In other texts it is made clear that this is the second unit Sartoris raises, an irregular one that he organizes after his original regiment demotes him and he returns to Yoknapatawpha.
The Confederate regiment that Colonel Sartoris originally led was fighting in Virginia when the soldiers in it "turnt right around and voted him outen the colonelcy," according to the way Will Falls tells the story (21). Falls is condemns their action, but suggests that the reason for it may have been Sartoris' elitist attitude when he says the "voted him out because he wouldn't be Tom, Dick and Harry with ever' skulkin' camp-robber that come along with a salvaged musket and claimed to be a sojer" (20).
In Flags in the Dust Little Belle Mitchell's piano teacher, who assists her during her recital, runs closely to type: "a thin, passionate spinster with cold thwarted eyes behind nose glasses" (200).
At the livery stable where Rafe takes Bayard in Flags in the Dust are a number of "onlookers" (129) sitting "on top of the gate" or "leaning with crossed arms upon it" (126). Presumably they are admiring the stallion in the lot, though when its runs away with Bayard by crashing right through the gate they "hurl themselves to safety" (129).
In Flags in the Dust Dr. Brandt shares his Memphis office with at least one other medical "specialist," who is described as "large," "with a majestic, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker" (246).
This is the serviceman in Flags in the Dust whom Montgomery Ward Snopes cons into declaring him medically unfit for military service by holding "a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit" all the way from Jefferson to Memphis (167).
In Miss Jenny's account in Flags in the Dust of the wedding and newlywed life that Bayard and Caroline live in Memphis, she mentions "the [aviation] pupils of Bayard's" and his "soldier friends" whom she sees. Like their wives, whom Jenny calls "young women who ought to have been at home," these are all obviously members of the same "lost" generation as Bayard (51).
In Flags in the Dust the insignia on this marine's uniform identifies him as belonging to the Second Marine Division, which saw heavy combat during World War I; he expresses his contempt for Horace's Y.M.C.A. uniform, which marks him as a non-combatant, by "making a vulgar sound of derogation" and spitting, "not exactly at Horace's feet, and not exactly anywhere else" (158-59).
