In its account of modern changes in Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun focuses on the generational experience of the "son" of the large plantation, who goes to World War II from "the seat of the tractor" with which he, rather than his father's tenants, works the land; upon his return he leaves behind "the long monotonous endless unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields" to live with his wife and growing family "in automobile trailers of G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges" (193).
The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that at least in Requiem for a Nun this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race.
In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).
Requiem for a Nun notes when the "sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk" (35), the "bailiffs" (36), and the other officials of Jefferson occupy the newly constructed courthouse (35).
In Requiem for a Nun, these are the eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. It seems likely that at least some of them, like the canoes they traveled in, are Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada.
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Anglo-Saxon" pioneer not only fought the Indians he found in the territory; he also fathered children on some of them: "scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness" (81-82). "Dusky bellies" is ambiguous, but almost certainly refers to Indian women. And while miscegenation between black and white in Faulkner's world made one a 'Negro' and socially inferior, it was common for 'white' southerners to boast of a Native American ancestor on the family tree.
The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).
When Temple Drake Stevens describes her ancestors to Gavin Stevens, she mockingly points to "long lines of statesmen and soldiers high in the proud annals of our sovereign state" (95).
In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182).
Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132).
