The first set of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are on the road, trying to catch up with the Union Army as it moves across Mississippi. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40).
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this character is carrying "a baby, a few months old" when the party from Sartoris meets her on the road. She is escaping the plantation where she had been enslaved, hoping to reach the Union Army as it moves through Mississippi, and has fallen behind the others in group of former slaves she had been traveling with (Raid, 41).
There is a Frenchman's Bend character named "Samson" in both As I Lay Dying, where he narrates a section of the narrative, and Light in August, where only his name appears. In the first novel, he lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. The barn suggests he is farmer, but when his section begins he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112), which may mean he also owns a country store.
In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, the man who attempts to sell Lucas Beauchamp a metal detector is "young, not yet thirty, with the assurance, the slightly soiled snap and dash, of his calling" (226, 76). When he falls for Lucas' story about buried treasure he ends up renting the machine from Lucas to search for the money on his own.
The narrator of "Tomorrow" refers once to "all the people in our country - the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners" (91). He is explaining that, despite his Uncle Gavin's formal education at Harvard and Heidelberg, he knows how to talk to "all the people" so that they understand him. This is a rare passage in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which the population of the county is aggregated across racial and class lines, though the intent of the passage is apparently to praise Gavin rather than the county's shared community.
In "By The People" the "People" are seen through several different lenses. For example, Gavin Stevens and his nephew, the narrator, divide them generationally: Gavin refers to "the ones of my age and generation" (133), and the narrator, to "the ones of my age and time" (134). In either case, however, the "people" evoked are white.
In "By the People" the "People" of Yoknapatawpha are organized around several different points of reference. This entry refers to a group defined at the start of the story around the character of Ratliff: the ones who buy what he's selling as a salesman and the ones who enjoy listening to him as a raconteur. We could call these the (white) people of Yoknapatawpha as consumers. This group is subdivided by location and gender.
