This character only appears in Absalom! at third-hand, when Sutpen remembers what he heard his father saying about how he and some other poor white men "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers" (187). In response to Sutpen's question about who this slave was or what he "had done," the father replies only that he is "that goddamn son of a bitch Pettibone's nigger" (187).
When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives.
When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives.
In Absalom! the two "house servants" who work for Goodhue Coldfield (14), "both women" (42), were legally slaves when he first "came into possession of them" - "through a debt," Mr. Compson says, "not purchase" (66). He "frees" them immediately, but does not give them "their papers of freedom"; instead, he credits the "weekly wage" they earn but don't receive toward their "market value" as slaves, forcing them to work toward their freedom (66). They are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66).
The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends in Absalom! is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195).
The "men who said the ship [Sutpen sails on] was going to the West Indies" in Absalom! (197) may not have been sailors or shipmates, but the inference seems justified by the narrative fact that Sutpen "learns to be a sailor" to get himself to the Caribbean (200).
A "consul" was the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. In Absalom! the "youthful Roman consul" traveling among "barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered" is the symbolic figure with whom Mr. Compson compares Charles Bon, the urban sophisticate visiting the "isolated Puritan country household" of Thomas Sutpen (74).
During the Civil War both North and South used provost marshals as a kind of military police force behind the lines. The "Confederate provost marshals' men" from whom Goodhue Coldfield is hiding in Absalom! would have arrested him as a draft dodger or compelled him to serve in the military (6).
In the immediate aftermath of the South's surrender, according to Rosa's account in Absalom!, "men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns"; a deputation from this group unsuccessfully demands that Sutpen join them (130). Rosa never gives the group a name, but when she later describes their "sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses" it seems obvious that the Ku Klux Klan is being evoked (134). (There are entries for Klansmen in other texts in this index.)
In Absalom!, among the plantations in Tidewater Virginia live "other whites like" the Sutpens, who "live in other cabins" that are shabbier than the whitewashed cabins in "the slave quarters" (185). Sutpen's sisters and "the other white women of their kind" look at slaves passing in the road "with a kind of speculative antagonism"; when these women talk, their voices are "dark and sullen" (186).
