While "Lawyer" Stevens and Sheriff Hampton seem to take charge of the events in Jefferson in Intruder in the Dust, the narrative does remind readers that the town and county have the usual elected officials. The out-of-town architect who wants to buy the jail door takes his request to "the mayor and the alderman and at last the board of supervisors" (54). And Hampton does say he got the mayor's permission to give the night marshal Monday night off (216).
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, various municipal officials stop by Gavin Stevens' office in his absence. The narrator identifies them only as "officials from the city hall and justices of the peace and bailiffs" from various parts of Yoknapatawpha (263, 360).
In The Town these "folks are still going home from the second running of the picture show" when they see two strange men in Christian's drugstore (162).
When Light in August describes Christmas walking in Jefferson around 9 p.m. it says that if he'd taken the same route at 7 p.m. he "would have passed people, white and black, going toward the square and the picture show" (i.e. the movies, 114). This is a rare instance in the fictions of people of both races doing the same thing - though of course there were separate "White" and "Colored" seating areas inside the theater.
Sitting in the Square in Intruder in the Dust, Chick watches the "crowd" of movie-goers exit the theater, "blinking into the light," "bringing back into the shabby earth a fading remnant of the heart's celluloid and derring dream" (33).
In "Dry September" the young audience in the movie theater where Minnie Cooper and her friends go is described as "scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young" (181).
In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.
Intruder in the Dust includes the story of the Frenchman's Bend man who has been making moonshine whiskey "for years bothering nobody," until his wife and another local woman start feuding (227).
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the moonshiner from whom Rider buys whiskey is described as "an unshaven white man" standing at the door of "a hut, a hovel" in the river swamp (246, 140). He is repeatedly referred to as "the white man" during the exchange with Rider. But he expresses concern about Rider's state of mind, and tries to "give" him a pint if Rider will give back the gallon he just bought for "four silver dollars" (246, 140).
In The Unvanquished Bayard notes that Mrs. Habersham "took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married" (220), but says nothing more about the minister himself.
