In "Knight's Gambit" there are two different but essentially interchangeable groups of workers who turn the old plantation that Harriss inherits into a conspicuously modern and lavish show place. The text even uses the same word to describe both groups: gangs. First on the scene are the "gangs of strange men with enough machinery to have built a high-way or a reservoir" who build the stables, paddock, and polo field (161).
Work "gangs" in Faulkner's fiction are often black, but the one described in The Reivers as "laying a sewer line" in Memphis is presumably white, since Mr. Binford is found working as part of it on one of his self-imposed absences from Miss Reba (112).
In The Mansion, when Watkins Snopes enlarges the de Spain house into "the mansion" for Flem, his construction crew consists of "kinfolks and in-laws" (171).
The Confederate veterans in Absalom! are brought into existence by Shreve, who is a Canadian who has never been to the South. He imagines the "veterans in the neat brushed hand-ironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with," decked out for a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262).
In The Town Gavin Stevens refers with both irony and sentimentality to the remaining veterans of the Civil War as the "heroes of our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle"; "half a century" after the end of the Civil War these old men are revered by "all" the people of Yoknapatawpha (44). As Charles Mallison explains, the descendants of these men are often "called General or Colonel or Major because their fathers or grandfathers had been generals or colonels or majors or maybe just privates" (10).
In Requiem for a Nun, the ceremony at the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900 includes the firing of a salute and a somewhat diminished version of the famed 'rebel yell' performed by the town's surviving veterans of the Civil War, "old men in the gray and braided coats" of officers - since they have apparently promoted themselves over the passing years (188).
According to the narrator of Light in August, at the end of the Civil War most of the men who fought for the Confederacy "returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead" (474).
This is "the ragged unshaven lieutenant who leads the broken companies" of the Confederate brigade that has to retreat through Jefferson after losing a battle outside the town in 1864 (49). His appearance catches the eye of the jailer's daughter, who marries him "six months later" (49). When Faulkner retells this story from Intruder in the Dust again in Requiem for a Nun, he expands it quite a bit.
In "Retreat," the Confederate officer in command of the unit that is camped on the outskirts of Jefferson talks with Buck McCaslin about Colonel Sartoris. He recurs in "The Unvanquished," when Bayard remembers this earlier scene, and then repeats these two appearances in The Unvanquished.
The conductor in the last scene of The Town motions for the four children of Byron Snopes to "mount "into the train (390). He does not seem to recognize them, so must be a different conductor from the one who several pages previously was so glad to get them off the train.
