Historically, Haitian slavery was abolished and French ownership of land forbidden by law before Sutpen was born. The novel represents the people who rise up against the rule of the French sugar planter so symbolically that it is impossible to know if it sees them as enslaved or not. Before the rebellion they are depicted as the unseen sound of "the drums and the chanting" at night (202), and a "blank wall of black secret faces, a wall behind which almost anything could be preparing to happen" (203).
This is the second of the novel's two entries for the "half-breed servants" on the Haitian sugar plantation where Sutpen puts down the slave rebellion (199).
This is one of two entries for the "half-breed servants" on the Haitian sugar plantation where Sutpen puts down the slave rebellion (199). It represents the "two women servants" (204) who are shut up inside the plantation house during the rebellion (also referred to as "a few frightened half-breed servants," 199). They help load the muskets with which Sutpen and the planter try to defend the house.
Sutpen tells General Compson that his first father-in-law's wife "had been a Spaniard" (203); much later in the novel he tells his son Henry that in fact, as he discovered after marrying, she "was part negro" (283). This woman never appears in the novel, apparently having died before Sutpen gets involved with her husband and daughter. The Chronology at the end of the novel treats her mixed racial identity as a fact - "Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood" (305) - but the actual novel does not independently confirm it.
The "French sugar planter" (199) who becomes Sutpen's "first father-in-law" (268) after Sutpen saves him and his plantation from a slave rebellion is not described in any detail. Since his daughter is described as "Haiti-born" (268), it seems likely that he himself is originally from France. He is apparently a widower, since he tells Sutpen that his daughter's "mother had been a Spanish woman" (283).
When Sutpen realizes that the French architect has run away, he sends word to General Compson "and some others" in town; these "others" are the "guests" who are invited to witness or take part in the "race" to recapture the runaway, as if it were an entertainment (177, 178, 206). Compson brings champagne, "and some of the others brought whiskey" (178). They are wealthy enough to ride horses. In Sutpen's mind, these men will expect him to track the man with dogs (178).
Since Sutpen believes that his "guests" will expect him to use "dogs" (rather than his slaves) to track down the escaped architect, this is the "man with the dogs" (178).
This is one of the two groups of men from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon - a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) - deliberately provokes a racial reaction: "the white men" who refused to believe he was "a negro," believing instead that he was "besotted" by "sexual perversion" (167).
This is one of the two groups of men from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon - a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) - deliberately provokes a racial reaction: "the negro stevedores and deckhands on steamboats or in city honky-tonks who thought he was a white man" (167).
