One of the more exotic characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this "Mohammedan" prince has a "European mistress" in Requiem for a Nun; he never appears in the novel, but is mentioned as the man who built the "hideway" in the south of France where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens take their honeymoon (122).
According to the account of the development of Mississippi from wilderness to civilization in Requiem for a Nun, "the politicians" follow the "land speculators" (172). The novel's history of the place that became Jackson more specifically notes the role the legislature played in creating a new state capital after the Mississippi territory achieved statehood in 1817, though it also notes, wryly, how at various later moments "the Senate" and "the House" alternately sought to change the location (85-86).
Requiem for a Nun lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising.
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these militia men are "part of a general muster at the settlement . . . for a Fourth of July barbeque" (201, 5). Like stereotypical frontiersmen, they are soon "ejected" from town for their "drunken brawling" (201, 5-6). After running into and capturing a gang of bandits, they return to the settlement in hopes of claiming a reward; instead, they are eventually locked up with the outlaws they had captured.
In Requiem for a Nun the "masons who erect" the Confederate statue in Courthouse Square are mentioned, but not described (189). They should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the secret society who are mentioned in The Town.
In Requiem for a Nun the German tank gun that serves as Jefferson's monument to the men who served in World War II was captured "by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms," the sons of interned Japanese Americans (194). (Over 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, many in the 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.)
As noted in Requiem for a Nun, during World War II the U.S. government interned over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them US citizens) as "enemy aliens" (194). Most of these people had been living on the west coast, and all the interment camps they were taken to were west of the Mississippi.
In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190).
The Mississippi wilderness in Requiem for a Nun is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (10).
