In "A Rose for Emily," there are an unspecified number of these "very old men," at least some of whom fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, at Emily Grierson's funeral (129).
One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. "A Rose for Emily" brings the townspeople as a collection onstage in the story's very first sentence, where the narrator refers to "our whole town" (119).
This man is the character in "A Rose for Emily" who protests, "in diffident deprecation" (122), that the town must do something about the smell coming from the Grierson house.
The "Negro women" in "A Rose for Emily" appear only in a negative phrase identifying Colonel Sartoris as the Jefferson mayor who "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (119-20). We hear nothing else about these women or this edict, whether they complied or it was enforced or when it might have been rescinded. The "apron" would have typified, not to say stereo-typified, all black women as domestic servants.
In "A Rose for Emily," this crew of Negro men come from out of town to pave the town's sidewalks; the "singing" they do "in time to the rise and fall of the picks" [pick-axes] they swing is a source of entertainment to the town boys (124).
In "A Rose for Emily," these "ministers" (123) show up at Emily's house with a group of doctors after her father's death to urge her to let go of her father's corpse. The story doesn't say how many ministers there are, nor what churches they represent, but Jefferson's main denominations are Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian.
The mayor of Jefferson is mentioned in "Uncle Willy," though not named or seen, when the women who live in Willy's neighborhood march with their children toward his office to complain about the woman whom Willy has married and brought home from a brothel in Memphis.
One of the three town mayors in "A Rose for Emily," and the only one without a name, this man takes office in the early 20th century, and seems much less chivalrous than his 19th-century predecessor, Colonel Sartoris, who treats Emily as a lady who should not be bothered about financial matters . This new mayor sees her first and foremost as a tax-payer, though he is chivalrous enough to offer "to send his car" to bring her to the town's offices to pay her long-overdue property tax (120).
