Mister Ernest's wife died of unspecified causes three years prior to the time of the narrative in "Race at Morning" - that is, a year prior to Mister Ernest adopting the narrator.
The narrator of "Race at Morning" calls the man with whom his mother ran off "two years ago" a "Vicksburg roadhouse feller" (307). "Roadhouse" is a dialect term for an inn or tavern on the side of a road. This man may have worked there, or perhaps the phrase just means the roadhouse is where he and "maw" met (307).
In "Race at Morning" there are both "hands and tenants" on Mister Ernest's property (308). The narrator does not define the difference, but presumably the "hands" work for a salary, and the "tenants" farm a parcel of land for a share of the crop after it is harvested. The narrator's parents were among the "tenants"; no other members of either group are described, but it's likely that there are blacks as well as whites among them.
These generic game wardens - the state officers who supervise the start and ending of the deer hunting season in Mississippi - are noted briefly, only once, by the unnamed narrator of "Race at Morning."
The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his mother "maw" (307). She abandons him and his father two years before the story takes place, when she "took off in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast" for her son (308).
The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his father "pap" (307). He leaves his son behind when he leaves the tenant cabin he lives on at Mister Ernest's place, presumably to search for his wife, who has herself run off with a "durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake" (308). He never returns for his son.
The Simon who appears in "Race at Morning" is not Simon Strother, who appears in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished. Like that earlier 'Simon,' however, he is a servant, one of black cooks for the white deer hunters. He also handles the hunting dogs while the white hunters pursue deer.
According to the twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" Mister Ernest "wasn't jest a planter; he was a farmer" too - which means he worked on his land along with "his hands and tenants" (308). He raises "cotton and oats and beans and hay" (309) at Van Dorn, his estate somewhere close to the wilderness in which the hunt takes place. A widower, he adopts the unnamed narrator when the child's parents - tenant farmers on his land - abandon him. Mister Ernest goes deer hunting each November with a party of men from Yoknapatawpha.
Requiem for a Nun establishes the social status of Jefferson's "Female Academy" by referring to the value that a "certificate" from it has for "a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" (177).
Requiem for a Nun's narrator creates this 'character' as a point of reference. As part of his description of Jefferson's "Female Academy," he mentions a hypothetical "young female from Long Island or Philadelphia" who receives an invitation "signed by Queen Victoria" (177).
