"An Error in Chemistry" refers to the neighbors of Wesley Pritchel as the "people in the adjacent countryside" (119). It is safe to assume that they are all, like Pritchel himself, farming families. They play several different roles in the story. They gossip about Wesley's relationship with his "son-in-law" (114). Until Pritchel drives them off, they take clay from his clay-pit to make "serviceable though crude pottery" (119). The "man and his wife" who are Pritchel's "nearest neighbors" are summoned to his house by the sheriff to stay with the old man after Ellie's murder (118).
The young woman whom Bayard calls "Cousin Melisandre" in the short story with the long title "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" is a upper class refugee: she leaves Memphis after it is captured by the Union forces to spend the War at the Sartoris plantation in northern Mississippi. She seems related to Bayard on his mother's (Millard) side, but the only information the story provides about her family is General Forrest's reference to "that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian" (694).
After Ike McCaslin moves into town in Go Down, Moses, this landlady rents him the room where he continues to live at least at the beginning of his marriage.
Although Go Down, Moses does not say so explicitly, this man would have been a slave on the Beauchamp plantation before the Civil War. After it, he is an "ancient and quarrelsome" old man who continues to live with his former master, Hubert Beauchamp (289).
The man Rider kills belongs to the large Yoknapatawpha family of Birdsongs; the deputy sheriff tells his wife how large it is: "It's more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There's forty-two active votes in that connection" (252). As voters they have a lot of influence with the county sheriff, but it's clear from both what the deputy says and the events of the story that as a clan the Birdsongs aren't going to rely on the law to punish Rider for killing one of their own.
In "Pantaloon in Black" as both a story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, the man Rider kills belongs to the large Yoknapatawpha family of Birdsongs; the deputy sheriff tells his wife how large it is: "It's more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There's forty-two active votes in that connection" (148). As voters the men in the family have a lot of influence with the county sheriff, but it's clear from both what the deputy says and the events of the story that as a clan the Birdsongs aren't going to rely on the law to punish Rider for killing one of their own.
In "Two Soldiers" this is the first soldier that the Grier boy speaks to in Memphis. He is wearing an "arrerhead on his sleeve" (94), so he is possibly a member of the 36th Infantry Division ("Arrowhead"), which was activated on November 25, 1940.
During the Civil War these blockade runners smuggled in provisions through the Union naval blockade for the inhabitants of Charleston. According to Aunt Jenny in The Unvanquished, they were "heroes in a way" (244).
In Absalom! Colonel Willow is the commander of the University Grays in 1865, when he allows his fellow officer, Colonel Sutpen, to use his headquarters tent to meet with Henry.
