In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude.
"Blind and deaf," with eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, Sanctuary gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place.
In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (229, 81).
The black woman who serves in "Mule in the Yard" and The Town as both partner in and witness to Mannie Hait's ongoing feud against mules and a man named I.O. Snopes remains a kind of enigma. No one in the town knows how old she is: as the story puts it, "she was about seventy probably, though by her own counting . . . she would have to be around a hundred" (249). Even at the younger age, she would have been born into slavery, though that story remains untold.
Nub Lowrie's appearance in Intruder in the Dust is memorable. His name - Nathan Bedford Forrest Gowrie - comes from a former slave-dealer who was also one of the Confederacy's most effective generals and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan; his nickname - "Nub" - combines the initials of his first names with the fact of his missing left arm. How he became handicapped is not explained, but the loss doesn't diminish the force of his character. He is "a short lean old man with [pale] eyes . . . and a red weathered face"; his voice is "high thin strong [and] uncracked" (156).
Miss Myrtle in Sanctuary is one of the two women who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after the funeral for Red. Myrtle is the "short plump woman in a plumed hat" who is accompanied by Uncle Bud, a "boy of five or six" (250). She may be his mother, though her attempt to discipline him for drinking from their beers is half-hearted at best. (The context suggests both she and Miss Lorraine might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.)
The Myrtle in The Sound and the Fury is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece. (Chronologically it's possible that this is the same Myrtle who, younger, worked as a receptionist in Flags in the Dust, but the novel provides no evidence for that connection.)
The Myrtle in Flags in the Dust is a "young woman" who works for Doctors Alford and Peabody as a receptionist. In her exchanges with Miss Jenny, she is alternately a trained professional and a deferential southern girl.
The jailer in the three novels set in mid-20th century Yoknapatawpha is a man named "Tubbs" in Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun, and "Euphus Tubb" in The Mansion. In the first novel he is described as a "snuffy untidy pot-bellied man with a harried concerned outraged face" (51); although when Lucas Beauchamp is brought into his jail accused of killing a white man, he complains about having to risk his life "protecting a goddamn stinking nigger" "for seventy-five dollars a month," he is nonetheless faithful to his "oath of office" (52).
In Intruder in the Dust, the wife of the county jailer is only mentioned when the jailer, a man named "Tubbs," says "I got a wife and two children" (52). She appears in both the prose and the dramatic sections of Act III in Requiem for a Nun, though she is only named when in the latter jailer Tubbs mentions "Mrs Tubbs" (208). The prose section describes her as a woman "engaged in something as intimate as cooking a meal" (200).
