In Light in August someone called the "word-of-mouth messenger" brings news of Nathaniel from Colorado to the Burdens living at that time somewhere west of St. Louis (243).
In Go Down, Moses a growing number of local men join the hunters at Major de Spain’s camp to see Lion hunt down Old Ben. The men have a stake in the hunt: they “had fed Old Ben corn and shoats and even calves for ten years” (224). They are described as “in their own hats and hunting coats and overalls which any town negro would have thrown away or burned and only the rubber boots strong and sound, and the worn and blueless guns and some even without guns” (224).
The second of the Negroes whom Hightower hires to cook for him is a man. Although there are white households with only one servant in the fictions, where the servant is a male, this is the only instance in the fictions when a male servant is specifically identified as a domestic cook. It is the result of an exceptional circumstance. After Hightower's wife commits suicide, "masked men" scare off the light-skinned Negro woman who cooks for him (71).
The first of the two Negroes who cook for Hightower in Light in August is a woman who is described as a "high brown" (72). She quits after Mrs. Hightower's suicide, when her presence as a woman in his house makes her and Reverend Hightower vulnerable to gossip and vigilante violence (72).
In "Shall Not Perish" the narrator recalls, briefly, how Rosa Millard bravely "stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war" (112). Usually, carpetbaggers are associated with the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, while in The Unvanquished Rosa dies before the end of the war.
These are the men in Flags in the Dust who stay at the Beard Hotel; they come to Jefferson for various reasons: traveling salesmen, jurors from out of town, weather-stranded countrymen, even two "town young bloods" who keep a room as a place for gambling. Besides Byron Snopes, some - bachelors identified as "clerks, mechanics and such" - live there more permanently (104).
In Flags in the Dust "a negro lad" serves a car that pulls up to the curb outside the drugstore (274). Presumably he fetches something from the soda fountain inside the store, but that is not specified.
This icon represents the absent Union forces that are referred to several times in the chapter "Vendee," which takes place after the Yankees have withdrawn from the area around Yoknapatawpha. But they are mentioned in the story - for example, when Uncle Buck says Grumby's viciousness makes "even the Yankees" look good in comparison (105).
In Sanctuary during his train trip to Oxford, Horace rides on three different "whites only" cars, but on the first of these he takes a look into "the jim crow car" coupled to it (168). What he sees are "hatted cannonballs [the heads of the black passengers] swaying in unison" amid the "gusts of talk and laughter" (168). (Under the South's Jim Crow laws, as the phrase is usually written, train passengers were racially segregated.)
