In The Sound and the Fury Miss Quentin tells Jason she needs money to pay back "a girl. I borrowed some money from a girl" (214). It seems more likely, however, that the money is for an abortion, and that this "girl" is her invention.
In The Sound and the Fury the unnamed little girl who walks home from school with the Burgess girl is "scared" of Benjy, though her friend assures her that "he wont hurt you" (53).
When the present day of his section in The Sound and the Fury Benjy reaches the gate in front of the Compson house, he thinks of it as the place "where the girls passed with their booksatchels" (51). He may simply be remembering the girls who walked past over a decade ago, or more probably is referring to a new generation of girls who walk past his house in 1928.
In "Monk" the "country school" that Monk attends as a first-grader almost certainly was a one-room schoolhouse, and his schoolmates probably ranged in age from six to sixteen or so (48). But when Monk describes his experience there, he tells Gavin that "they [the students] would all read together out of the books," and that, although he was illiterate, "it was fine . . . to hear all the voices together," including his (48).
In Flags in the Dust Bayard and Raf are passed by "small groups [of] children going home from school" for lunch at noon, and three hours later they again "walk among school children" going home at the end of the school day (119, 126). These children are described as "little girls with colored boxes and skipping ropes" and "boys in various stages of deshabille" (119).
The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in The Town: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153).
In Absalom! the one-room Virginia school that Sutpen attends "for about three months" is "full of children three or four years younger than he" - i.e. 8-10 years old - and "three or four years further advanced" (194).
In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's grotesque childhood is set against the normal lives of other Jefferson children, "all the boys and girls" who go to school (372) and who run, for example, "with random shouts back and forth at recess" (371). As they grow up, these children "fall into inevitable pairs," courting and marrying (374).
Simon Strother, who was born a slave just before the Civil War began, provides the only depiction in Flags in the Dust of the enslaved men and women who 'belonged' to the Sartoris family. It occurs when he tells Dr. Peabody how the birth of Bayard and Narcissa's son will bring back "de olden times" (391). As his example of those times, he describes "de niggers fum de quawtuhs gethered on de front lawn, wishin' Mistis en de little marster well" when his "Mars' John's" son Bayard was born in 1849 (392).
