After the Civil War and her marriage in Requiem for a Nun, Cecilia (nee Farmer) becomes "the farmless mother of farmers (she would bear a dozen, all boys . . . ), bequeathing to them in their matronymic the heritage of that invincible inviolable ineptitude" (203).
Requiem for a Nun mentions the "Negro slaves" who belonged to the men who settled the territory around what became Jackson (82), but as is also the case with most of the "slaves" in Yoknapatawpha it mentions, these enslaved people are not described in any way.
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, the "Anglo-Saxon pioneer" (81) was followed by wealthier settlers who built the "river towns" like Vicksburg and Natchez, "men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats, who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds" (82). Included in this group is the first planter to grow cotton in the region - "someone brought a curious seed into the land . . . and now vast fields of white" covered the land (83).
In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute.
At various points in its prose history of Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson, Requiem for a Nun refers to the settlers who followed the frontier pioneers into the new land. There is some overlap in its representation of this group, and in the terms - frontier, pioneer - used to categorize them.
In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112).
According to the history of Jackson recounted in Requiem for a Nun, as the territory became more settled, the "steamboat gambler" replaced the keelboatman as "the river hero" (83). Since the gambler is only seen being put off the steamboat and "marooned" on a small island, the term "hero" is presumably freighted with irony (83).
The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184).
Near the end of the third prose section of Requiem for a Nun, the narrator looks up from the story he is telling to address the reader directly as "you" (198). He identifies the reader as "a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West" (198), and speculates that "you" may be college educated, or "perhaps even" have an graduate degree from "Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205). This second person plays a significant if rhetorical role in the way the history of Yoknapatawpha is ultimately evoked.
