In both "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun this courier rides to Natchez to inform authorities of the capture of the bandits and to negotiate for the presumed reward for their capture.
Sanctuary describes the various farmers and their wives who come into Jefferson on the weekend. Horace, for example, watches while three of these women get down from a wagon and "don various finery" on the street in front of his house. 'Country people' in this novel can be black or white: "the women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments," and the men "in slow overalls and khaki" who move in crowds through the town square and stand in throngs "listening" to the music playing on radios and phonographs in record and drug stores (111, 112).
Among the several kinds of crowds described in Intruder in the Dust are the ones composed of 'country people.' That is, people "from the distant circumambient settlements and crossroads stores and isolate farms," who regularly come in to Jefferson to shop and do other kinds of business. The last chapter opens with Chick watching them from the window of his uncle's office: "people black and white" (231), "men and women and children too then and the old people and the babies and the young couples" (230).
In "The Tall Men" Mr. Pearson, who works for the federal government, lumps all country people together in the phrase "these people" (46). Pearson's work with various relief agencies has taught him to expect the worst from country people, and he assumes that they are all shiftless and untrustworthy. The encounter with the McCallum family and the story of their lives, as Gombault tells it, forces Pearson to revise his assumptions and abandon his prejudices.
In "Uncle Willy" two different groups of people patronize Willy's drugstore. They are sharply distinguished by race - and by the kinds of things they buy. This group is the "country people buying patent medicines" (226); they are white.
"Three or four miles" outside the town that "The Hound" refers to only as "the countyseat" (162), the men in the Sheriff's car meet "wagons and cars . . . going home from market day in town" (163). The text does not actually mention any people in either kind of vehicle, but it does say that the "Sheriff greets them with a single gesture of his fat arm," and that "them" must be human (163), or at least potential voters.
In The Town this man works for the Sartoris family and drives a horse-drawn carriage rather than a car. He is holding the reins when Mr. Buffaloe drives his homemade automobile "into the square at the moment when Colonel Sartoris the banker's surrey and blooded matched team were crossing it on the way home" (12).
