The group from the county that attends Granny's funeral in both "Vendee" and The Unvanquished consists of both blacks and whites. The whites are "hill people" as opposed to townspeople; the "hill men with crockersacks tied over their heads" to shelter them from the rain are contrasted with the "town men with umbrellas" (98, 156). In a passage added to the novel, most of the blacks are described as having returned to Yoknapatawpha after following the Union Army to seek freedom (155).
The residents of Yoknapatawpha county are referred as a group to in "A Bear Hunt" in several passages. In particular, they are the folks that Ratliff encounters in his travels as a sewing machine salesman; specifically mentioned are "farmers' wives" at bazaars and sewing bees and "men and women at all-day singings at country churches" (63).
Although "the townspeople" as an entity plays a smaller role in The Sound and the Fury than in many other Yoknapatawpha texts, occasionally the narrative does indicate their presence. This is the most true in Jason's section, which is not surprising given his concern with his family's reputation and place in the eyes of those townspeople. Among the groups he mentions or refers to are the men who apparently gathered in Jefferson the previous Christmas to shoot pigeons who were roosting in and fouling the clocks in the courthouse (247).
Although the crowd in The Reivers that witnesses Boon firing his gun is in the Square in Jefferson, it is explicitly described as made up of people from outside Jefferson, from Yoknapatawpha county, who are in town for a "First Saturday," a traditional "trade day": "they were all there, black and white" (14).
The Mansion represents the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha as a group in various passages. According to the text, for example, "not just the town but the county came too" to Flem Snopes's funeral (461). In these references readers get some idea of the average living conditions for Faulkner's rural characters.
Throughout The Hamlet, Faulkner frequently focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." The people of Yoknapatawpha's "countryside" are described as a self-organizing social body, which can be compared to a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees" (349).
Elements of the (white) population of Yoknapatawpha are referred to in several ways in "Knight's Gambit." Their most pervasive role is as a kind of audience: "the county watches" the actions of the main characters unfold "as the subscribers [to a magazine] read and wait and watch for the serial's next installment" (149). For example, the people whom Gavin Stevens calls "the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes" share gossip and speculations about an unknown man who may have courted Mrs. Harris before her marriage to Mr.
Faulkner's "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury refers at different moments to the "whole town and county" (329), the "living fellowtownsmen" during Jason's time (330), and "the town" (340) - terms which almost always refer exclusively to Jefferson's white population. This generic group and the Compsons seem to have an estranged, at times even antagonistic relationship to each other.
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. When the narrator of Sanctuary first introduces the Old Frenchman's ruined mansion house, he identifies "the people of the neighborhood" around it as the ones who have been using its lumber for firewood and despoiling its grounds by digging for treasure (8).
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. The Hamlet describes the group as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his aristocratic "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him," who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4).
