In "Knight's Gambit" Max Harriss is "well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" at the Greenbury hotel in Memphis (208).
In "Knight's Gambit" the animals on the Harris plantation are very well attended to. There are not only "grooms" for the horses (234), but also "special human beings to wait on" the dogs (165).
In "Knight's Gambit" this is the specific groom among the various stablemen who work for Sebastian Gualdres who is in charge of his blind "night horse"; Gauldres tells Gavin Stevens that this mare "is left in the stable by the negrito each afternoon" (227).
The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit.
In "Knight's Gambit" these "two Negro boys" work on the Harriss plantation and "lay the trail of torn paper from one jump to the next" for the steeplechase (165). (The context makes it seem likely that these are men rather than "boys," and that that word should be understood as an example of how the Jim Crow culture used stereotypical language to demean black men.)
When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he has a kind of prevision of the local young men who will soon be killed in the fighting, and the grief of "those who had created" them, without realizing that the day would come when their child "might die in agony" in a foreign place they "had never even heard of before" and didn't even know how to pronounce (251).
When in "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II, he has a kind of prevision of a young man from Yoknapatawpha whose death during the fighting overseas will be reported in the local paper, along with a photograph showing "the country-boy face" inside "the uniform still showing the creases of the quartermaster shelves" (251).
The description in "Knight's Gambit" of the people who watch the polo matches at the Harriss plantation includes (separate from the "farmers" and "the tenants and renters and croppers") a group it calls "the landholders" (163). This presumably refers to the owners of the farm land that is worked by the tenants, renters and sharecroppers, though Faulkner usually refers to them as landlords or land owners - or "planters," the word he uses elsewhere in the story: "the bottomland planters” (251).
Several thousand Japanese sailors and aviators participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor that provoked the U.S. to declare war, but this entry reflects the unusual way Charles Mallison describes the attack in "Knight's Gambit": "a Jap dropped a bomb on another American" (254).
This "inspector-general" in "Knight's Gambit" is apparently part of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which was officially organized in 1915 to train male college students in military tactics and discipline (205). He certifies the high quality of the R.O.T.C. program that Charles Mallison participates in as a student at the Academy in Jefferson. R.O.T.C. programs are usually based in colleges and universities, but according to Charles, "although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C.
