After serving in the Civil War's western theater, the Union general Philip Sheridan came east when Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to command the cavalry forces in the Army of the Potomac. What Gumbault tells Pearson in "The Tall Men" about how "Sheridan's calvary blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley" at the very end of the war is accurate (54).
At first sight Dr. Schofield "might have been any city doctor, in his neat city suit" (49). During his house call to see about Buddy McCallum's injured leg in "The Tall Men," Dr. Schofield proves himself a practical physician who is sensitive to the wants and needs of his patients. He trusts Buddy's judgment concerning the amputation of his leg and, in doing so, provides a contrast with Mr. Pearson's distrust and misjudgment of the family as a whole.
Pearson is the "state draft investigator" in "The Tall Men" (45). A man of "better than average intelligence," he has developed an arrogant, stereotypical way of thinking about country people (48). His previous relief agency work has taught him to expect the worst from such groups, but his encounter with Mr. Gombault and the McCallum family is "different from what he had expected" (48). Over the course of the story, he learns how wrong his assumptions can be.
In "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin Stevens calls the warden at the penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, to gather information about Samuel Beauchamp.
These advertisers - presumably local businessmen and professionals - appear only hypothetically in "Go Down, Moses," when Mr. Wilmoth, the editor of the Jefferson paper, worries whether he'll lose "what few advertisers I have got" (262) for helping Stevens organize a funeral for a black man, Samuel Beauchamp.
In both "Go Down, Moses," and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin remembers that "the papers of [the] business" with Samuel Worsham Beauchamp went to "the District Attorney" (258, 354).
In both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.
Apparently except for Fentry, the workers at Quick's sawmill in Frenchman's Bend are all black. At least, when Isham Quick describes Fentry's arrival at the mill in "Tomorrow," he says he did "the same work" and drew "the same pay as the niggers done" (103). (In the larger Yoknapatawpha context, this is an exception to the usual absence of Negroes, except for a few domestic servants, in the Frenchman's Bend area.)
All that the readers of "Tomorrow" learn about Mrs. G.A. Fentry is that, like her mother-in-law before her, she died before she was forty. According to Pruitt, it was "that place," the poor Fentry farm on which she lived and the impoverished life she led there, that killed her (96).
In "Tomorrow," according to Pruitt, when Stonewall Jackson Fentry left his father's farm to try "to earn a little extra money" working at a sawmill in Frenchman's Bend, he made some kind of arrangement with this unnamed black man to help on the farm in his stead. Pruitt tells Gavin Stevens he often heard the father "cussing" the man "for not moving fast enough" in the field, but when two years later the son brings the baby home, the Fentrys continue to employ him for a season (97).
