The one-room school that Sutpen attends "for about three months" is "full of children three or four years younger than he" - i.e. 8-10 years old - and "three or four years further advanced" (194).
The young groom who accompanies Mr. Compson and Quentin on their hunting excursion in Chapter 6 is named Luster. Mr. Compson teases him for being superstitious about graveyards and ghosts (173). In The Sound and the Fury Luster is Dilsey's grandson, the young black boy who watches Benjy Compson in the late 1920s. In that novel, however, Luster was born after Quentin's suicide, so his presence with Quentin in Absalom is inexplicable. Shreve is speaking the first time Luster's name is mentioned - "what was his name? . . .
In 1870, about a year after her father's death, Judith Sutpen finds a buyer for the crossroads store. The man himself never appears in the novel, but the money he pays her is used to buy at least one and possibly two of the tombstones in the Sutpen's graveyard.
The midwife who delivers Milly Jones' baby is an "old negress" (151). She lives in a cabin "three miles" from the fishing camp (230). Although she runs away immediately when she overhears Wash killing Sutpen, the authorities find her a week later and it is from her that most of the details of the last scene in Sutpen's life are learned. (In "Wash" she is called "Dicey.")
The narrative mentions the (presumably authoritarian) tone of voice in which Sutpen "used to address his orderly or even his house servants" (149). In this context an "orderly" is a soldier who serves a commanding officer as a kind of servant. Sutpen's "house servants," like nearly all the servants in Faulkner's world, are black, and during the Civil War many Confederate officers took slaves with them to the war, but these are called "body servants" in the fictions, and explicitly racialized as black.
Shreve and Quentin speculate that as an incentive to get Bon to attend the University of Mississippi, the novel's unnamed lawyer offers to "buy him an extra special body servant" to take along (250); later they depict this "new extra nigger" unpacking Bon's "fine clothes" in his stateroom on the riverboat taking him to college (252).
Shreve describes the people who shop at the "little crossroads store" that Sutpen opens after the Civil War as "a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash)" (147). As at other country stores in Faulkner's world, there are often "lounging men" on the front porch, but here the "customers and loungers" are racially mixed: "rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes" (149), "the black and the white" (227). After Sutpen's death, when Judith runs the store, the clientele is feminized: "women and children with pails and baskets" (152).
There apparently are "a hundred" men in the posse that encircles Wash Jones at the fishing camp (233). A group that large probably contains men from several different social classes, but when Wash thinks about the men "gathering with the horses and dogs and guns," he thinks of them as "men of Sutpen's own kind, who used to eat at his table with him" and as "men who had led the way" in battle, men like Sutpen who "galloped also in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses about the fine plantations" (232) - i.e. members of Yoknapatawpha's upper class.
There are at least two characters named "Major de Spain" in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, one who was an actual Major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and another who is his son, called "Major" as a kind of honorific. The Major de Spain in this novel is the father, one of "the men of Sutpen's own kind," the "men who had led the way" during the War," now serving as "sheriff" of the county (232). He tries to take Wash Jones into custody without violence.
The "halfgrown boy" whom Judith pays a nickel to ask Wash Jones where her father is is "whistling" when he reaches the fishing camp and sees the corpse "lying in the weeds" (229). The novel does not specify his race, but the same boy is called 'white' in "Wash" when he finds the body, and throughout the fictions Faulkner usually mentions it when a character is not white.
