Only one of the prostitutes who work at Miss Reba's in The Mansion, Thelma, is given a name (84). As a group they are imagined, in Montgomery Ward Snopes' narration, "running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that," and also "screaming and fighting and pulling each other's hair" (81). According to Snopes, "so many" of them "came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families" (83).
Sanctuary spends a lot of time in Miss Reba's, but the women who work their as prostitutes remain largely offstage. At various times Temple, Fonzo and Virgil hear their laughter or the rustle of their clothes. In Chapter 21 they appear as "a plump blonde woman" (192), a woman "in a kimono" leaving "a trail of scent" (194) and a "blonde woman in a red dress" (198).
The entry represents both the "armed guard" who stands outside Samuel Beauchamp's cell in the penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, and the prison officials who enter the cell and prepare Beauchamp for his execution (351).
In The Mansion the guards at Parchman penitentiary are described as "men with shotguns" at the gate, and as "men on horses with shotguns across the pommels" overseeing the inmates as they work in the field (54).
These are the prison workers in both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses who are in charge of Samuel Beauchamp's execution: the "armed guard" who stands outside his cell and the penitentiary officials who enter the cell and prepare Beauchamp for his execution (256, 351).
In his hunt for Joe Christmas in Light in August Sheriff Kennedy is joined by a large posse. There are "thirty or forty" men waiting for the bloodhounds who arrive on the train the day after Joanna's body is discovered (296), and the narrative suggests this same group remains on the trail through the following week.
These are the men in The Town - all "enraged fathers" - who tar and feather "actual schoolmaster" Snopes for taking advantage of an adolescent girl (43).
In "Wash" and again in Absalom! this is the group of armed white men who ride out with the sheriff to the shack where Wash lives to arrest him. They arrive as night falls, so Wash sees them mainly as moving shadows, but in his mind, at least, they are felt to be "men of Sutpen's own kind," the aristocratic leaders of the plantation South, the "arrogant and proud on the fine horses across the fine plantations" whom he had once looked up to, but who now seem to him not just "symbols of admiration and hope," but also "instruments of despair and grief" (547, 232).
These are "the police" who come to the Temples' apartment to arrest Nancy in Requiem for a Nun (153). (Elsewhere Faulkner describes the officers of the law in Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha as sheriffs and deputies and marshals, but not as 'police.')
