As Sutpen moves across the Square after talking with General Compson, the General sees "old Mr McCaslin and two other old men hobble out and stop him" to talk (221). McCaslin has his own entry. The fact that all three are "old" is an indication of how the Civil War has emptied Jefferson of most of its other male residents.
While he lies outside his big house "in a barrel stave hammock . . . with his shoes off," the owner of the plantation on which Sutpen's father works is waited on by a slave "who wore every day better clothes than [Sutpen] or his father and sisters had ever owned"; this slave's task is "to fan" the owner "and bring him drinks" (184). It is possible that this is the same man as the enslaved "butler" who tells Sutpen later to go around to the mansion's back door (187), but that is not indicated in the text.
One of the most important characters in Thomas Sutpen's story is referred to only by the unfortunate label of "monkey nigger" (186, 188, 189) or "the monkey-dressed nigger butler" (187). This is the slave of the planter for whom his father works, and who, when Sutpen comes to the front door of the plantation's big house with a message, "keeps the door barred with his body" (187) and tells the white boy "never to come to the front door again but to go around to the back" (188). This man is described in terms of his fine clothes: "the very broadcloth and linen and silk stockings" (189).
To explain his father's decision to move east to the Tidewater, Sutpen speculates about who might have influenced the decision, and describes three different possibilities: "somebody, some traveler," who praised the quality of life in the Tidewater; or "perhaps somebody his father knew once . . . [who] happened to think about him; or "someone kin to him . . . [who] had sent for him" (181). Sutpen's musings here resemble the novel's larger pattern of speculation, as Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin and Shreve all try to define 'Thomas Sutpen' or 'Charles Bon.'
Pettibone is the only one of the characters, black or white, who appear in the Tidewater section of the novel who is named, and in his case the name is an adjective rather than a noun: Sutpen's father comes home one night boasting that "we" - he and other poor white men - "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (187). The whole passage suggests that "Pettibone" himself is the owner of a plantation near the one that Sutpen works on.
Among the plantations in Tidewater Virginia live "other whites like" the Sutpens, who "live in other cabins" that are shabbier than the whitewashed cabins in "the slave quarters" (185). Sutpen's sisters and "the other white women of their kind" look at slaves passing in the road "with a kind of speculative antagonism"; when these women talk, their voices are "dark and sullen" (186).
The upper class women in the Tidewater are represented by two who never come completely into view: the carriage that almost runs down one of Sutpen's sisters contains "two parasols," and "two faces beneath the parasols" that "glare down" at the poor white girl (187).
This icon represents the "certain few men" who own the fields and the slaves who work in them, and who hire the overseers who watch the slaves; they "have the power of life and death and barter and sale over others" (179).
