Ratliff reports that Will Varner had three "mulatto concubines" - the "first Negroes" in Frenchman's Bend, "and for a time the only ones [Varner] would permit there" (289).
In his reconstruction of Flem moving his money to the Bank of Jefferson, Gavin imagines him being "stopped on the street one day" by this share cropper, "one still in the overalls and the tieless shirt . . . attached irrevocably by the lean umbilicus of bare livelihood . . . to the worn-out tenant farm" (281). He looks at Flem "with envy and respect (ay, and hatred too)" for having "wrenched himself free" of "the overalls and the grinding landlord" that define the costume and the world of a tenant farmer.
This icon represents the various inhabitants of Jefferson over the years. This 'character' includes the people whom Rosa repeatedly calls "they" in Chapter 5 - as in the chapter's very first words:"So they will have told you . . . " (107). It also includes the group that the novel occasionally refers to "the town" (24). Like Rosa's "they," this is implicitly a racially segregated term: the town's white population as a collective entity. Often, however, it is also segregated into male and female.
This is the "driver" of the "ambulance" that Rosa takes out to the Sutpen place at the end of 1909, to bring Henry into town "where the doctors could save him" (299).
Quentin Compson is the one character who is present, at least implicitly, on almost every page of the novel. He is one of the four people who tell various parts of the story of Thomas Sutpen and his family in the attempt to reconstruct the past, but even more pervasively he is the listener to the stories the others tell in the novel's two different 'presents': a hot afternoon and night in Mississippi in September 1909 (Chapters 1-4) and a cold Massachusetts night in January 1910 (Chapters 5-9).
At the center of Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen, from his childhood in the mountains of western Virginia to his violent death 62 years later in Yoknapatawpha. As one of the county's earliest, and certainly its largest planter, and a Confederate Colonel during the Civil War, he has a lot in common with John Sartoris, the man who represented the Old South's plantation aristocracy in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction. At the start of the war, Sartoris and Sutpen work together to raise and lead the Confederate regiment that fights in Robert E. Lee's army.
Besides the named characters who serve in the Confederate States Army - Thomas and Henry Sutpen, Sartoris, Bon, and so on, and the specific units they serve in - Confederate soldiers appear in a number of ways in the novel. First, as the "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120).
The Union Army in the novel is an unseen but important force. When "Yankee troops" pass near Yoknapatawpha at some point in the Civil War (66), for example, Coldfield's two Negro servants and "all of Sutpen's" slaves "follow the Yankee troops away" (67). On the other hand, the novel is much less interested in the conflict between North and South than in the conflicts within the Old South.
"The little boy" in the picture that is found on Charles Bon's body (75) is Bon's "sixteenth part negro son" (80) with the grandiloquent name of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon. When Judith and Clytemnestra bring him to Sutpen's Hundred after his mother dies, Judith tells him to "Call me Aunt Judith" (169), perhaps without realizing that he is in fact her half-nephew and her father's grandson.
