In "Miss Zilphia Gant," these farmers from the countryside around Jefferson tether their teams in the lot beside the Gants' shop when they come into town "on market days" (371). While "hitching or unhitching" their horses and mules, they see Zilphia's "small wan face" behind the bars on the window of her room; they have "heard about" what Mrs. Gant did to her husband, and they discuss the sickly child without any sign of compassion (371).
In The Hamlet this man owns the farm where Ike Snopes finds food for his cow. He is a "man past middleage" with a "grim and puritanical affinity for abstinence and endurance" (211); angry at the loss of his feed and a feed basket, he angrily pursues Ike through the woods.
In Intruder in the Dust when Chick sees a truck parked outside his house, he assumes it belongs to someone like "a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor" (72). Although he is wrong, Chick even imagines what this hypothetical person looks like: "a man with a shaved sun-burned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants" (73).
In "Dry September" the man who owns the "abandoned brick-kiln" once used the land around it as a pasture, but he stopped doing that after "one of his mules" went missing in one of the property's "vine-choked vats without bottom" (179). He is presumably a farmer, though he might be a mule-trader instead.
In Light in August this veteran of the First World War remarks that if he had it to do over again "he would fight this time on the German side" (450). When he adds that he would fight America too "if America's fool enough to help France out again" (450), he is attacked by Percy Grimm.
In "Dry September" one of the men in the barber shop who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes is a veteran. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).
Two of the major characters in "Knight's Gambit" spend time in Europe before or after the First World War. During the decade Mrs. Harriss and her two children spend in pre-War Europe, the contents of her letters home from Europe relate tales "of the families of the porters and waiters who had been kind or at least gentle with her and the children, and of the postmen who delivered the mail from home" (167).
In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin imagines these Europeans while lying on his cot in one of the few remaining pieces of American wilderness: "the frantic old-world peoples" who buy the cotton that is grown on the Delta, and use it for "shells to shoot at one another" (275, 337). Although at the time of the story the U.S. had not entered the war that became known as World War II , major fighting was underway between the Allies and the Axis armies.
In The Sound and the Fury this drummer appears at the hardware store where Jason works, and the two men discuss cotton. Jason invites him to go to the drugstore to get "a dope" (191). ( "Drummer" is an outdated term for a traveling salesman; "dope" is an outdated term for a Coca-Cola.) Because he thinks Jason believes him to be a Jew, he tells Jason that "my folks have some French blood" (191).
