The "Forrest!" for whom Theophilus McCaslin cheers at Bon's funeral is Nathan Bedford Forrest (122). A slave-dealer in Memphis before the Civil War, Forrest rose during the War to the rank of general and, in command of a cavalry unit, led much of the fighting and skirmishing in the areas of Tennessee and Mississippi in which Yoknapatawpha is imaginatively located.
First mentioned as "Wash's infant granddaughter" living with him and her mother at the fishing camp (99), this character re-appears after the Civil War as an adolescent girl named Milly (229) whom Sutpen courts with cheap "candy beads and ribbons" from his store (149) and then impregnates. She and her father and her newborn daughter and Sutpen all die violently at the camp on the same day.
This icon represents the Confederate infantry unit that John Sartoris and Thomas Sutpen "raise" in Jefferson in 1861, and that travels east to fight in Virginia as part of Lee's Army (63); serving "at one time" as part of Stonewall Jackson's corps (223). Sartoris is the Colonel in command during the first year, but in 1862 the men in the regiment vote to replace him with Sutpen.
Henry and Bon enlist and serve in the Confederate company organized at the start of the Civil War by "their classmates at the University" (69). According to Mr. Compson, its men come from across the entire class spectrum: "rich and poor, aristocrat and redneck" (97), and the flag they carry toward the fighting was sewn a few stitches at a time by "the sweetheart of each man in the company" (98). The soldiers in this company are seen again near the end of both the novel and the war as "gaunt and ragged men sitting or lying about" the campfires in the bivouac in Carolina (280).
These merchants and sales clerks "fetch out" to Ellen Sutpen "the cloth and the meagre fripperies and baubles" for sale in their stores during her "weekly ritual" of driving "store to store" in Jefferson (57).
Shreve speculates that when Henry and Bon go to the stable before riding away on Christmas Eve, "maybe there was a nigger there" to saddle their horses (266).
Already on Christmas Eve, according to Mr. Compson, "the nigger children, with branches of holly and mistletoe for excuses, already lurking about the rear of the big house to shout 'Christmas gift' at the white people" (84). Traditionally slaves were given holiday at Christmas, and the tradition of being rewarded for being first to wish someone a merry Christmas, while not exclusively southern or interracial, was part of the festivities.
This "negro groom" accompanies Henry Sutpen to college as his personal servant (77). Among his duties is carrying letters back and forth between Oxford and Sutpen's Hundred, and it is presumably he who at the beginning of the Civil War "steals into the quarters by night" to give "Judith's maid" Henry's final letter to Judith (273).
