Minnie's former husband in Sanctuary - the first text in which she appears - is described as a "cook in a restaurant" who "didn't approve of Minnie's business" as a maid in a brothel, so he took everything he could from her and "went off with a waitress in the restaurant" (209-10). Minnie sounds glad to be rid of him. The husband referred to in The Mansion is named Ludus - and while he too steals Minnie's money, he also beats her savagely (89); although he's currently in prison, it's not clear that Minnie is rid of him.
In The Reivers, Ludus works as a driver for the livery stable, but is well known for his "tomcatting" - having affairs with local black women, single and married (13). When he "borry"s a team and wagon from the stable overnight to visit "a new girl" six miles out of town, he gets into trouble with Boon (10).
A major character in The Reivers. "Miss Corrie," as she is called when Lucius first meets her (99) - or "Everbe," as he calls her after learning later in the narrative that her given names are "Everbe Corinthia" (153) - was born in Kiblett, Arkansas. After her mother's death, her foster-mother put her to work as a prostitute "as soon as she was big enough" (154). She is, Lucius notes when he first meets her at Miss Reba's, "a big girl," "still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain" (99).
In The Reivers Otis tells Lucius that Corrie (whose full first names are "Everbe Corinthia") is named for his "Grandmaw" (153). Since he is identified as Corrie's nephew, it seems likely that this woman is also her mother, or as Otis calls her, her "maw"; she died when Corrie herself was a young girl (153).
First introduced into the canon as Lucius (Luke) Provine in the short story "A Bear Hunt" (1934), where he is a major character, he recurs in the last two novels in the Snopes trilogy and The Reivers as Lucius Hogganbeck. As Provine, he is forty years old and almost toothless, a hanger-on at the hunting camp, a "tall, apparently strong and healthy man . . . who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64), as well as violent, shiftless and boozy.
Louis Grenier occupies a special place in the history of Yoknapatawpha as the "Old Frenchman" after whom Frenchman's Bend is named. He himself never directly appears in any of the nine texts that mention him, though he gets closest to the narrative in "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, which describe the county during the antebellum years Grenier was there. In half of the fictions he is referred to only as "the Old Frenchman," and it's likely that none of the inhabitants of the Bend would recognize his name if they heard it.
Lonnie Grinnup was christened Louis Grenier. He is, as Intruder in the Dust notes, the only living descendant of the elegante Frenchman, the first Louis Grenier, whose vast antebellum plantation gave Frenchman's Bend its name. Lonnie has no conception of his aristocratic heritage; he is "a cheerful middleaged man with the mind and face of a child" who lives in a decrepit shack twenty miles away from the mansion his ancestor built (74). In the earlier "Hand upon the Waters," his murder is the occasion for one of Faulkner's detective fictions.
While James Longstreet is not nearly as mythic a Confederate figure as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or J.E.B. Stuart (only one character in the fictions, for example, is named after him, and even then the character's full name is "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry"), as a general and corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia Longstreet probably understood and practiced the more modern warfare that emerged on the battlefields better than any other Confederate commander.
In both "Pantaloon in Black" and Go Down, Moses Ketcham is an officer of the law who, despite his Dickensian name, works at the jail and deals with the men who have already been caught. He is at the jail trying to maintain order among the inmates when Rider is brought there. He is not named in Requiem for a Nun when Temple Drake Stevens describes his attempt to subdue the (also) unnamed Negro widower whose grief sends him into a frenzy.
In The Hamlet this is the justice of the peace in Jefferson who marries Flem Snopes and Eula Varner. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.
