This is the group of "four or five other boys of [Quentin's] size and age" in Absalom! who go out to the decaying Sutpen mansion "daring one another to evoke the ghost, since it would have to be haunted" (172). The group includes Luster; the other boys are not described, but all run away when confronted by Clytemnestra among the "rotting piles" of the old slave quarters (173).
In Absalom!, after Rosa Coldfield returns to her house in Jefferson in 1866, "the town - farmers passing, negro servants going to work in white kitchens" - see her raiding the neighbors' gardens "before sunup" (138). "The town" is often a kind of character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the way this passage identifies the town with "farmers" (who are from the country) and "servants" (who are not white) is exceptional.
As the "young men" at University of Mississippi organize themselves into the University Grays in Absalom, their "fathers and mothers and sisters and kin and sweethearts" travel to Oxford from around the state to witness and support their "sons and brothers" preparing for war (97). The "sweethearts of each man" all take turns sewing the unit's battle flag (98).
In Absalom! the "first black man, slave," that Sutpen ever sees is this "huge bull" of a man who throws his drunken father out of a "doggery," a rough tavern, in the middle of the family's journey across Virginia (182). The man's description focuses on his "mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones" (182).
Shreve speculates in Absalom! that when Henry and Bon go to the stable before riding away on Christmas Eve, "maybe" a slave is there to saddle their horses (266).
Absalom!'s narrative speculates - hyperbolically - about the existence of a "special" slave in the lawyer's office, whose sole job is to carry faked reports about Sutpen's whereabouts to Bon's mother (244).
On her annual visits to Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!, Rosa sees her sister Ellen lying in a darkened room "and a negro woman sitting beside the bed with a fan" (19). She is presumably Ellen's personal maid.
Conventionally, the enslaved people in the antebellum South were divided into two categories: 'field Negroes,' who had little contact with whites other than overseers, and 'house Negroes,' who worked indoors as cooks, maids, butlers, and so on. In Absalom!, Jefferson's "house negroes" first appear accompanying the white "ladies and children" to church services, carrying the "parasols and flywhisks" that keep the sun and insects away from the whites (23).
This entry represents either one, two or perhaps as many as three different slaves in the Sutpen mansion mentioned in Absalom!; they play basically the same role, though wear different textual labels: the "servant" who informs Rosa and her father that their buggy is ready to drive them back to town (19), "the nigger" whom Sutpen sends to ask Henry to see him in the library (266), and, after that meeting, the "house nigger" who repacks Henry and Bon's saddlebags and takes them to the stable (266).
