The representation of modernity in Requiem for a Nun includes "the boom and ululance of radio," represented by the voices that are heard on it: "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists" (192).
Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends.
In Requiem for a Nun this 20th-century "planter" is a generic figure whose fate suggests the kinds of changes that have occurred in Yoknapatawpha: where once he had slaves and then tenants to work his fields, after his "son" is drafted in the second World War it is the planter himself who does that, riding "on the seat of his tractor" (193).
In the play's first scene in Requiem for a Nun, "a section of the court" is represented on stage, and the stage directions list "the judge, officers, the opposing lawyers, the jury" (39). The "judge" and one of the officers - the bailiff - speak in the scene, and so have their own Character entries. This entry represents the other men referred to, though it's unlikely that any production of the play would cast actors to represent the "opposing lawyers" or "the jury" on stage.
According to the history of Jefferson provided by Requiem for a Nun, soon after the first whites arrive in Yoknapatawpha come these "new" settlers: "new names and faces too in the settlement now - faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible antecedents other than mammalinity nor past other than the simple years which had scored them" (12).
All we know about referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "the man who kicked" Nancy and caused her miscarriage is that he might have been the unborn child's father (219). Because the assault happened at "a picnic or dance or frolic or fight" and Nancy would not have been allowed to attend a gathering of whites, we are assuming this man is black (219).
There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190).
According to the narrator of Requiem for a Nun, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87).
Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.)
The narrator of Requiem for a Nun begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi.
