The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The fireman who keeps the fire burning at the sawmill is described as "an older man" (243). The narrative from his perspective makes evident just how much of a sight Rider is after a night running through the woods (243).

Lucas’s life and family history are outlined in great detail in Go Down, Moses (1942), the novel in which "Pantaloon" was republished. He appears in the story as the new husband who on his wedding night lit a fire in the hearth, where it burns for the duration of the marriage, a gesture that Rider imitates upon marrying Mannie.

Edmonds rents a cabin to Rider and Mannie after their marriage, though unlike most of the blacks who live on the McCaslin property, Rider does not work for Edmonds as a tenant farmer.  The mention of Edmonds here is notable for giving Faulkner a way to tie Rider and "Pantaloon" to the McCaslin family narrative that fills Go Down, Moses, where "Pantaloon in Black" later appears as a chapter.

These are the sexual partners who filled Rider’s life before he met Mannie: "the women bright and dark and for all purposes nameless he didn’t need to buy" (240).

This woman is a constant presence both in Rider's life and in the text: "She was his aunt. She had raised him. He could not remember his parents at all" (238). Several other characters, including her husband and members of Rider's mill gang, are referred to as her messengers, as she makes repeated efforts to rein in Rider's self-destructive bent by encouraging him to turn to family and to religion.

The African Americans who gather at Mannie's funeral are "the meager clump of [Rider's] kin and friends and a few old people who had known him and his dead wife both since they were born" as well as the men Rider works with at the mill (238).

Mannie is described as having a "narrow back" and "narrow" hand (241). Rider indicates that she is far slighter than her powerfully built husband: "You’s de onliest least thing whut ever kep up wid me one day, leff alone for weeks" (241). She is present in the story in memories, traces of footprints in the road, the "clean overalls which Mannie herself had washed only a week ago" that Rider wears to her funeral (238), and a brief, ghostly presence that Rider sees upon returning home after Mannie’s burial.

Acey is a member of Rider's mill gang who is present at Mannie's funeral, and he offers comfort in the form of company and “a jug in de bushes” (239).

Rider is the head of "a mill gang" at the sawmill (239). These other Negroes attend Mannie's funeral, and several of them try to help him in his grief. Some of them are also among the workers who shoot dice after hours at the mill.

One of Faulkner's most memorable black characters, Rider is depicted from two different perspectives in the story. Each perspective - that of a third-person narrator and then that of the white deputy sheriff who tells his wife about Rider in the tale's second section - describe him as powerful, even superhuman in his strength, "better than six feet and weighing better than two hundred pounds" (238). At 24 he is the head of a sawmill work gang, and he rents a cabin from Carothers Edmonds. At 24 he is the head of a timber gang at the mill, and he rents a cabin from Carothers Edmonds.