In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, these are the "two strange white men" whom Lucas believes "came in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um" (227, 78).
Buck Turpin is probably a merchant or businessman in Jefferson. In The Sound and the Fury he owns the lot in which the traveling show that performs in town over the Easter weekend sets up its tent, being paid $10 for that.
In Flags in the Dust Minnie Sue is a young woman in Frenchman's Bend whom Byron Snopes has courted in the past, and whom he "paws" in a sordid attempt at sex on his flight from town after robbing the bank (281). She seems unfazed by his behavior, though she is also unaccommodating, ordering him to "come back tomorrer, when you git over this" (281).
This is the younger of the two Turpins mentioned in The Mansion. Like the older one, he is associated with Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the hill country. Gavin Stevens recalls that he failed to "answer his draft call" during World War II (459). He is presumably related to the older Turpin, and perhaps to the Turpin family that appears in Flags in the Dust, but the novel does not say how.
In Flags in the Dust Turpin is the Frenchman's Bend farmer (or tenant farmer) at whose "low, broken backed log house" Byron Snopes stops on his flight from Jefferson after robbing the bank (279). Two Frenchman's Bend 'Turpins' appear in The Mansion at the other end of Faulkner's career, but how they are related to this one is never explained.
Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72).
In the "white only" cars of three trains that Horace takes during his journey to Oxford in Sanctuary he sees sleeping travelers who lie with throats turned upward "as though waiting the stroke of knives"; when some awaken their "puffy faces" and "dead eyes" evoke "the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust" (168). A crying child is said to be "wailing hopelessly" (168). And the man beside whom Horace finds a seat immediately "leans forward and spits tobacco juice between his knees" (168).
In The Reivers Lucius describes the (white) passengers who ride on the "Special," the major train that runs between Memphis and New York, as "the rich women in diamonds and the men with dollar cigars" (194). He also mentions the "Negroes" in the "Jimcrow" half of the train's smoking car (194); see Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 1. ("Jimcrow," usually written Jim Crow, is a synonym for the Southern system of racial segregation.)
According to Gail Hightower's wife in Light in August, the other passengers on the train bringing them to Jefferson look curiously at him as his voice rises while he tells her the story of his grandfather's death (485). (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)
