The historical Madame de Pompadour who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" was the primary mistress of Louis XV, an 18th century King of France. Issetibbeha returns home from France with some furniture reputedly owned by Louis XV.
The historical Baron de Carondelet who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" served the Spanish empire as Governor of Louisiana between 1791 and 1797. In the story, he and de Vitry are "said" to be friends in New Orleans, which at that time belonged to Spain (318).
In "Red Leaves" Louis Berry is one of the Indians who leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - a task which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. Louis is described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313).
The narrators of "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun note that the first slaves brought into Yoknapatawpha belonged to Grenier, a man better known as the Old Frenchman. The slaves who worked on his huge plantation before the Civil War appear, though tangentially, in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet.
Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "an old man in a shabby brown overcoat" sailing a toy boat beside the children (316).
Shortly after Issetibbeha dies in "Red Leaves," this unnamed man speaks with two Indian women about the old days, before "the world" was "ruined by white men" and slavery (323).
In "Knight's Gambit" the Negroes who live along the railroad tracks in Jefferson are identified only by their "alien yet inviolably durable" homes, the "Negro cabins" Charles sees out the window of the train bringing him home (252-53).
In Absalom! these "negroes" who live in Jefferson report Charles E. S-V. Bon when he gets "either blind or violently drunk in the negro store district" in town; they "seem to fear either him or Clytie or Judith" (170).
In "The Old People" these Negroes live and work on the narrator's family farm, probably as tenant farmers. The cabins they live in may once have been part of the slave quarters. The racial and economic realities of Yoknapatawpha require them to put on the semblance of "servility," to have "recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth . . . to sustain [a buffer] between themselves and white men" on whom they depend for their subsistence (203).
In "A Justice" Sam Fathers lives among Negroes in the quarters on the Compson farm. They apparently work the Compson land on shares as tenant farmers, and they distinguish themselves from Sam by calling him "a blue-gum" (343), or "Uncle Blue-Gum" (344).
