In Requiem for a Nun these are the "slaves" that John Sartoris brings with him, along with "gear and money," when he first arrives in Yoknapatawpha (35). In this novel none of them are given a name or any other individuality.
None of The Unvanquished stories ever refer directly to the slaves who worked for the Sartorises in the fields. In "Vendee" as both a short story and a chapter in the novel, Ab Snopes tells Bayard that Rosa Millard's death came as a result of what Ab and Rosa were doing "for [Bayard's] sake and his paw and them niggers" (109, 174).
There is no evidence how many enslaved people lived and worked at the Sartoris Plantation. There may have been other slaves who worked on the plantation in addition to the ones that are named, but the novel's only explicit reference to them is made as the "negroes" who called John Sartoris' room the office (15), which is where they would face the patroller "and swear that they could not possibly have been either who or where he (the Patroller) said they were" (16).
The "runaway slave" mentioned in Absalom! is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites).
Among the various kinds of jailed prisoners mentioned in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are "runaway slaves who were captured in the settlement" (202, 6). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story does not say where these slaves escaped from. Instead, it notes that the "single wooden bar" across the door of the jail effectively keeps them from escaping again (202, 6).
In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the "revenue officers and deputies" whom Lucas remembers worked for the U.S. government (215, 61). Selling or buying alcohol was illegal by Mississippi state law, but in general the moonshiners who made and sold whiskey were prosecuted for evading federal tax regulations.
Jack Crenshaw and this man whom The Town does not name are federal officers, "revenue field agents" (182), who "are just interested in whiskey, not photography" (183). They find the moonshine whiskey in Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio. (As officials whose task it is to make sure all alcohol production is properly taxed, 'revenuers' play a prominent role in the lore of moonshine whiskey.)
The "federal revenue agent" in The Reivers who went out to Ballenbaugh's to investigate the production and sale of moonshine whiskey and never returned worked for the Treasury Department (73). The presumption is that he was killed by the moonshiners. 'Revenuers' - as they were called - were charged with enforcing laws against making and distributing illegal liquor.
A "revenue agent" was an employee of the U. S. Treasury Department charged with enforcing the Volstead Act prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages during the Prohibition era. In "A Bear Hunt" Uncle Ash invents such a man, telling John Basket and the other Indians (who are making moonshine) that Luke Provine was a "new revenue agent" coming to catch them making illegal whisky (78).
At noon in Rogers' grocery and restaurant in Flags in the Dust are two different groups of people: there are "a number of customers" in the grocery, not otherwise described, and in the restaurant "a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people" (119).
