In The Town, Gavin refers to the women - groups of "four or five or six ladies in sunbonnets" who live on "back-country roads" (240) - as the customers to whom Ratliff sells sewing machines, and from whom he has learned how to listen. Gavin's use of "ladies" is generous; these are the wives of the poor farmers who inhabit Yoknapatawpha's "back-country" in the fictions.
In The Town, the potential customers asking for directions to the Snopes Hotel are "country men" - men from the countryside outside Jefferson - who "were told simply to walk in that direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it" (42). (The woman is I.O. Snopes' wife. Faulkner here spells "country men" as two words, but our name spells it as one word, which Faulkner himself did elsewhere; see Unnamed Countrymen 1, for example, in this index.)
The Jefferson couples who receive invitations to the Cotillion Dance in The Town represent the town's social elite. Charles describes their appearance as "crimped and frizzed in scarves and earrings and perfume and long white gloves like Mother or in claw-hammer coats and boiled shirts and white ties and yesterday's haircuts like Father and Uncle Gavin" (75-76).
Ab Snopes' limp is the result of an inglorious wound in the Civil War: he was shot in the heel by this "Confederate provost's man" while stealing a horse - from the southern army (5). (In other fictions the man who shot Ab is variously identified as Colonel Sartoris himself and a Confederate picket.)
Ab Snopes' Civil War wound was never received in battle, or even from a Yankee, but Faulkner provides several different accounts of the Confederate who shot him while he was stealing a horse and left him with a lifelong limp. In "Barn Burning" that man is identified as "a Confederate provost's man" (5). We are assuming this is the same person who shoots him in two other texts, which provide slightly different versions of Ab's wounding.
These men in The Town are described as Jefferson's "storekeepers and doctors and lawyers and mayors and such as that"; their "quiet and peaceful" suppers are disturbed by the sound of Manfred De Spain's car when he passes by the Mallison house (62).
None of these people are mentioned as individuals in The Town, but Gavin and Charles pay a visit to this community, where the local population was "having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181).
This "Chinese laundryman" mentioned in The Town is the only Asian character who appears in Yoknapatawpha. Charles Mallison explains why, although he is not white, this man is in a category that is distinct from the one that the other non-white - i.e. Negro - inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha belong to: "And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even kindless, half the world or anyway half the continent . . . sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule" (321).
These workers begin remodeling Manfred de Spain's house after Flem purchases it in The Town. They are adding columns consistent with the stereotypical image of the antebellum mansion.
