In The Mansion this person is a voice that Mink Snopes overhears: during the night Mink spends in the waiting room at the railroad station, the telegraph operator "talks to somebody now and then," but the source of this second voice is never identified (39).
In Absalom!, "whenever anyone white or black stops in the road" to speak to Charles E. S-V. Bon (162), Clytemnestra "drives the passerby on" with a "murmur of vituperation" (162).
In "That Evening Sun" these people witness Nancy's confrontation with Stovall and "tell about" it; the "ones that passed the jail" later that night hear Nancy singing and yelling and the jailer trying to make her stop (291).
This entry represents the "passers" - i.e. people passing by - in "three different parts of town" whom Mrs. Gant questions in "Miss Zilphia Gant" about the families of the girls that Zilphia told her she "would like to visit" (373).
In Light in August, when Hightower walks home after learning that the Sheriff is closing in on Christmas, he is so shaken that when "someone speaks to him in passing," he "does not even know" that he has been addressed (310). There's no indication of the gender of this passerby, but it's unlikely that a black would speak first in passing a white man, so we identify 'him' as white.
This is the "old negro woman" in Light in August who sits, "smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth," whom Joe Brown calls "Aunty" when he asks her to help him get a message to the sheriff (433-34). At first she refuses, saying that the one black man she knew who "thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him . . . aint never come back" (434).
When Popeye's mother gets sick after her husband abandons her in Sanctuary, she goes to this "old negro woman" rather than a doctor, and the woman "tells her what was wrong" (304). The narrator doesn't tell us, but the problem is probably syphilis.
