The "small negro boy" who delivers Rosa Coldfield's note to Quentin Compson is the first black character mentioned in the novel (5). The text doesn't say which door he went to at the Compson house.
Rosa Coldfield mentions the "many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen" who are members of "the literary profession" (5). She does not name any names, but genteel fiction and poetry by Southern authors were staples of the national magazines around the turn into the 20th century.
Rosa's description of the way Sutpen used to race with other carriages to church mentions in passing the "women and children [who] scattered and screamed" when the teams thundered up to the church door (17), and two different sets of men: the ones who "catch at the bridles" of the "other team" (17) and the other men who join in the racing, who "aid and abet" Sutpen (16).
The minister of the church that Sutpen's family attends tries to stop Sutpen from racing his carriage to church by "speaking [to him] in the name of the women of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County" (17). This stops Sutpen from coming to church, but the racing continues for a while. Although the novel doesn't say so, it's likely that this man is an Episcopalian minister.
The wife of General Compson, "Father's mother" (225) and Quentin's grandmother, plays a minor role in Absalom!. At the time of her marriage she is "a stranger in Jefferson" who is left "in hysterics" after a visit from Rosa's aunt; in a comic variation on the theme of the continuing presence of the past, "even twenty years after that day" she refuses to discuss what happened (42).
Goodhue Coldfield's grandfather never appears in the novel, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen by noting that her father knew "who his grandfather had been in Virginia" (11).
Goodhue Coldfield's father never appears in the novel, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen's parvenu status by noting that "our father knew who his father was in Tennessee" (11).
This figure is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites).
