According to Mink's narrative in The Mansion, Fonzo Winbush's mother "wasn't a Snopes" (80). She tells Fonzo never to stay anywhere that isn't managed by a woman who looks "mature and Christian" and "most of all motherly" (80).
In The Mansion Grover Winbush's jealous wife is convinced that the nude woman pictured on the French postcard that Winbush brings home from Montgomery Ward was actually Winbush's "private playmate" (77).
In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).
The Mansion mentions in passing that Will Varner looks "like what his father had been," a Confederate cavalrymen who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest (18).
Veterans who have returned from fighting in the Second World War are a major element of the social landscape in the second half of The Mansion. Goodyhay's unconventional congregation is made up mainly of vets, or their surviving parents and spouses; one of them wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been" to the church service (305). Because they know what "Devries's medal meant," veterans form an important element in the anti-Snopes coalition during the 1946 Congressional election (346).
In The Mansion Charles Mallison remembers the "war heroes" who returned to Jefferson after World War I, both the "wounded" and the "unscratched ones" who wore their "divisional shoulder patches and wound- and service-stripes and medal ribbons" around town (200).
The female clientele at the "joint" where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion would be more surprised by an ear trumpet than a "G string" (275). They are presumably, like Linda, women who work in the shipyard because the male population has gone to fight in the war; the reference to the "G string" as well as the noise in the "joint" is the narrative's way of implying how non-traditional, by the standards of southern gentility, is their behavior and appearance.
These "properly-educated white teachers" appear in The Mansion as an idea: they are the teachers whom Linda Snopes Kohl wants Jefferson to hire to instruct the students who attend the town's "Negro school" (250).
During Mink's long confinement at Parchman in The Mansion there is a turnover of wardens. It is not clear when the old warden leaves and this new one arrives. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, this second warden is remarkably kind and sympathetic towards Mink.
