The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the neighbors of the Gant family are, like many other groups of people in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, a nosy, gossipy bunch. When Gant's assistant goes to the local store to complain about his treatment, he finds them "gathered at the store" already talking about "the pistol incident" - that is, about Mrs.
In "A Justice," "the People" is the collective term for Doom's tribal members, and they are differentiated from "the black people" (351, 355). The People as a tribe are also often segregated by gender, as when "all the men sleep in the House" (350), or when on the way to the steamboat, the women walk while the men ride in wagons (351). In this early story the Indians are identified as Choctaws; later Faulkner will consistently refer to the Indians who lived in the land that became Yoknapatawpha as Chickasaws.
The narrator of "A Courtship" uses the phrase "the People" to describe the tribe to which he and the other Indian characters in the story belong, as in this sentence: "The People all lived in the Plantation now" (361). He does not explicitly say they are Chickasaws, the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in most of Faulkner's references to the indigenous population, but that they are part of the Chickasaw nation can be inferred from his reference to David Colbert as "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).
In the short story "The Unvanquished" and again in the novel The Unvanquished, where the short story is re-titled "Riposte in Tertio," these two men help Ab Snopes as part of Granny Millard's campaign against the Union troops in Mississippi - which is to say, they help Ab take the mules Granny steals to Memphis, where they can be sold back to the Union Army.
He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.
In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, the top sergeant in the Union troop that arrives at Sartoris is named Harrison. He may be the Yankee who is first spotted by Ringo and Bayard looking at the plantation through field glasses; if so, it is his horse that they kill attempting to shoot him. He was clearly angered by that shooting, which cost the regiment "the best horse in the whole army" (29). Much more hostile to Rosa Millard than his commanding officer, he orders other soldiers to search the house in search of the "little devils" who did the shooting (29).
The story "Skirmish at Sartoris" briefly acknowledges the many enslaved people who sought freedom by emancipating themselves as the Union Army passed through Mississippi. Groups of these people, and a few of them as individuals, are described in some detail in the earlier story "Raid." The chapter "Skirmish at Sartoris" in the novel The Unvanquished revises the reference in "Skirmish" to the "Negroes" who "passed in the road [beside Hawkhurst] all night long" (59) as "the niggers passing in the road" at night (189).
The second group of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are encountered at the river in Alabama; Drusilla, Rosa, Bayard and Ringo have to move through a huge crowd that is trying to reach the Union army on the other side. It consists of "men carrying babies, women dragging children by the hand, and women with babies, and old ones pulling themselves along with sticks" (48). They are being held away from the bridge by the Union cavalry.
