The unnamed man whom "Red Leaves" calls "Issetibbeha's body servant" - though there is never any ambiguity about the fact that he is owned as a slave by the Choctaw chief - is the short story's central character, Faulkner's earliest non-white protagonist. According to tribal custom, after Issetibbeha's death he must be killed and buried too; the story's main action focuses on his thoughts and actions as he attempts to escape this fate. Although he is not given a name, the story does give him a biography.
In her account of Nancy's arrest in Requiem for a Nun, Temple describes in moving detail the "Negro prisoners" whose hands can be seen lying between the bars of the jail's windows. Initially she describes them as "the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murdresses too," but her representation of them also includes the kinds of labor and domestic work they perform (plowing and rocking cradles and so on) as a crucial part of Yoknapatawpha's economy (155). She compares them to the more privileged "white persons" (155).
In the "common room" beside the cell holding Cotton in "The Hound" are the men the narrative calls the "minor prisoners": "a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets" who have been jailed for vagrancy, selling whiskey and shooting craps (163). One of them is at the window, "yelling down to someone" outside the jail (163), and one talks to Cotton, telling him to "Hush up, white man," when he starts going into detail about Houston's corpse (164).
This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191).
In Intruder in the Dust the narrator calls the man who opens up the door of the barbershop at six o'clock every morning and "sweeps out the hair and cigarette stubs" a "porter" (30). The brief passage about him suggests he may also work in the pool hall nearby.
According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel.
In Intruder in the Dust this is the man who is "tending" the moonshine still that the Sheriff discovers (228). Claiming to know nothing about it, he takes care of the Sheriff, and the problem, by making him comfortable and offering him a drink or two or more of "water" (228).
In Go Down, Moses Lucas recalls this earlier source of competition for his moonshine business. Lucas takes a kind of pleasure in remembering how he got this man sentenced to prison.
