Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not.
Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station in The Mansion (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro.
The principal of Jefferson's Negro school in The Mansion is a "college-bred man" and, according to Gavin Stevens, a person "of intelligence and devotion too" (247). In his role as narrator of Chapter 9, Charles Mallison seconds Gavin's words, describing the principal as an "intelligent dedicated man with [a] composed and tragic face" (248). Along with the school's "senior woman teacher," he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247).
This group consists of the "girls" and "young men" - "probably the neighbors swapping the work" - who are helping to pick the unnamed Negro farmer's cotton in The Mansion (438).
The cotton farmer with whom Mink briefly stays in The Mansion has five children between the ages of "five or six and twelve" (438). All five work with their parents picking cotton. Only one is individuated by the narrative: the "oldest girl" (440), who is the "twelve-year-old" and who helps her mother prepare supper (441).
The wife of the cotton farmer in The Mansion works with him and the whole family picking cotton, and then, with her daughter, she prepares supper according to the etiquette of Jim Crow - that is, first she serves the meal for Mink Snopes to eat alone, and then "the meal for the family" (440).
In The Mansion this cotton farmer allows Mink to work and stay the night at his place. As a Negro he expresses himself carefully when talking with the white Mink, but he clearly has doubts about the story Mink has told him about himself.
In The Mansion this "Negro coachman" drives the young Melisandre Backus "in a victoria" (217). (This revises the way Faulkner represented Melisandre and her father's life in "Knight's Gambit"; there, although he's a planter, Mr. Backus uses a "barefoot" field hand rather than a domestic servant to drive his daughter, and a 'victoria' carriage is much more elegant than anything Backus would own, 245.)
In The Mansion Wattleg is a moonshiner who sells his whisky out of a "little unpainted store" near Wylie's Crossing that he can take apart and move to avoid the law (244).
In The Mansion the Negro who works for Jakeleg Wattman fetching liquor bottles to the customers wears "the flopping hip boots Jakeleg had worn last year" (245).
