In Intruder in the Dust these three "youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" are all "a little drunk" in Fraser's store when Lucas Beauchamp enters (18). One of them, with "a reputation for brawling and violence," is more than a little racist: he goes after Lucas for his attitude, calling him "biggity" among other names (18, 19). (This crew is probably entirely different from the "[saw]mill crew" who are hired three years later by the Vinson and Crawford Gowrie.)
In Intruder in the Dust Chick's mother exchanged friendship rings with this "room-mate" when they were in college together "at Sweetbriar Virginia" (68). The woman lives in California now, and her daughter goes to Sweetbriar.
The man who photographed Lucas and Molly for the studio portrait that Chick sees in their cabin in Intruder in the Dust is not described, but at Lucas' insistence he did take Molly's headrag off.
In Intruder in the Dust the crowd of spectators at the football game in the Mottstown high school stadium is divided between the people who "sit in the grandstand" and "the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play" (122).
In Intruder in the Dust, "every tenant and renter and freeholder white or black in the neighborhood" would find a reason to go to the crossroads store on Saturdays, "quite often to buy something" but also often just to visit with each other (18).
According to Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, "all the men" who first came to Jefferson worked together to build it, "to shape a land for their posterity" (49); according to this account, "the jailer then" or the "innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler" could be "what the lawyer and planter and doctor and parson called a gentleman" (49). This definition of "all the men" leaves out the ones who were enslaved.
According to Intruder in the Dust, on a typical evening one would see "Negro girls and women" outside the window of the jail, talking with the black men who are confined inside it (38). Even though the exceptional circumstances of the story have kept them away and in hiding, the narrator describes them as "the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses" (50).
The Negro servants who work for the white population of Jefferson are almost completely invisible in Intruder in the Dust. This is by their own actions: anxious about what might happen after Lucas is arrested for killing a white man, they stop going outside, even to work. But their absence provokes two descriptions of who they are, or at least what they look like, under conventional circumstances. On Sunday morning Chick imagines the "housemaids or cooks in their fresh Sunday aprons" on the porches of their employers' homes (38).
When Sheriff Hampton goes out to investigate Vinson Gowrie's grave in Intruder in the Dust, he takes along two Negro prisoners from the jail to do the digging. Both are dressed in "blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore" (136; in this context "street gangs" are chain gangs or convict work gangs). The narrative makes no effort to distinguish these "two Negroes," as they are repeatedly called (154, 156, 157, etc.). Both are equally anxious about their task, especially when Vinson's father appears.
