Character Keys

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "client of Mrs. Gant's" in the dressmaking shop arouses the dressmaker's wrath when she starts talking to the nine-year-old Zilphia about going to school: "You'll like it," she says, before being chased away by Mrs. Gant (372). It is presumably this woman who reports the situation to the county authorities - according to the townspeople, at least, it was "a client . . . that got Zilphia in school" (372).

Mrs. Gant is probably the most powerfully drawn character in the story named after her daughter, "Miss Zilphia Gant," just as she is an overwhelming force in Zilphia's life, even long after she is dead.

In "Smoke" the man who owns and runs the Jefferson drug store is named West. He is instrumental in providing county attorney Gavin Stevens with information concerning the stranger with the taste for "city cigarettes" (28).

Referred to in "Smoke" only as "they" (31), these people in Battenburg who seize the Memphis hitman after he runs down a child.

This man in "Smoke" - referred to only as "a Negro" - tells the authorities about seeing Old Anse "digging up the graves in the cedar grove where five generations of his wife’s people rested" (9).

The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary.

When Young Anse moves "back into the hills" in "Smoke," the “neighbors and strangers” in that most rural part of Yoknapatawpha leave him "severely alone" (6).

Nothing definite is said in "Smoke" about the "child" in Battenburg who was run down by the man hired to kill Judge Dunkenfield (31), but based on the fact that narrator doesn't specify race and the aggressive reaction of the people who arrest the driver, this child was presumably white.

Mr. Mardis is the father Cornelia Mardis. He owns two thousand acres of the finest farming land in Yoknapatawpha. The "five generations" of Mardises in the family cemetery suggest how long his people have been in Yoknapatawpha (8), though the family doesn't appear elsewhere in the fictions. On his death, Mr. Mardis leaves his property to his daughter, rather than to her husband, Anselm Holland.

In "Smoke" Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words.

According to "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard": "For sixty years three generations of sons and grandsons" have snuck onto the abandoned Frenchman's place at night, digging into its dirt in search of "the gold and the silver, the money and the plate" that was reputedly hidden there during the Civil War (136). Nothing has ever been found.

There's no question that Henry Armstid has driven himself mad "spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy" ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 137) in his "spent and unflagging fury" (The Hamlet, 404) to find buried treasure where there is none. But in both these texts there is something equally disconcerting about the fixed stare on the faces of the country people who gather from many miles around to watch him dig for "a week" (in the short story, 136) or even "two weeks" (in the novel, 404).

in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" the "second goat owner" lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139).

Both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and The Hamlet refer to the enslaved people who labored on the Frenchman's place before the Civil War as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136, 375). Nothing more is said, but implicitly this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which millions of southern blacks moved to northern cities (a movement that was just beginning at the time the story and the novel take place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s

In "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140).

One of the many people who gather on the Old Frenchman's place in "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" to watch Henry Armstid digging for treasure is distinguished from the group as "the first rider" (137). That is an unusual locution, but may just mean that he was riding by on a mule - or less likely, a horse - when he became the first person to stop to watch Armstid. He is chased away by Armstid, and then, presumably, spreads the word about what Armstid is doing.

In "Centaur in Brass," after "eliminating" the partner with whom he co-owns the restaurant, Flem Snopes procures a "hired manager" to run it (150). More cipher than character, this man's presence solidifies the town's opinion that the source of Flem's success in Jefferson is his beautiful wife. (Elsewhere in the fictions, when Flem moves on from the restaurant he puts a relative, one of his many 'cousins,' in it, but there's no indication that this "manager" is Flem's kin.)

Near the conclusion of "Centaur in Brass" Faulkner reveals that Flem Snopes lives in a bungalow on the bedraggled outskirts of town in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168).

In "Centaur in Brass" the mayor of Jefferson who is reportedly having an affair with Mrs. Flem Snopes is named Hoxey; according to town gossip, this affair account's for "her husband's rise in Hoxey's administration" (151). Hoxey is described the town's "lone rich middle-aged bachelor" and "a graduate of Yale" (151). His relationship with Mrs. Snopes clearly prefigures Eula Snopes' and Mayor Manfred de Spain's affair in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

Harker is the night engineer of the municipal power plant in Jefferson in both "Centaur in Brass" and The Town. In both the story and the novel he serves as a source of the story of Flem Snopes' effort to embezzle by turning the plant's two Negro firemen against each other. His attitude toward the events is mostly that of a bemused spectator, though in the novel's re-telling of the episode he actively intervenes to help the two Negroes recognize that their real antagonist is the white Snopes.

The "editor" of the local newspaper in "Death Drag" also does print jobs, like the handbill advertising the air show that Ginsfarb asks him to print (190). He expresses skepticism about the details of the performance, and when he demands payment in advance - "I ain't in this business for fun," he tells Ginsfarb - the job gets cancelled (191).

In "Death Drag," Jock goes to see Jones, "the secretary of the Fair Association," for permission to use the air field for a barnstorming show (188). There is no indication of Jones' day job, but his civic title suggests he belongs to the middle class of respectable "groundlings" in the story (188).

In "Death Drag" these "Fourth-of-July holidayers" died when, "about two years ago," Jock was forced to crash land the plane he was giving them a ride in, breaking the gas line, and one of them "struck a match" (194).

The narrator of "Death Drag" refers to him only as "the driver" and "the driver of the car," but we learn his name when one of the boys whom he lets ride with him by standing on the car's running boards calls him "Mr. Black" (189). He gives the three barnstormers a lift from the airfield to town.

This "whisky-trader" in "A Justice" who visits Doom's plantation "each summer" is the only white man Sam Fathers sees until he is twelve years old (346.. Presumably he trades moonshine whiskey to the Indians, in exchange for animal skins or other commodities.

When this second child is born to Sam Fathers' mother, and her husband is its father, the story called "A Justice" seems to suggest that Doom's solution to the problems of race, slavery and sexual rivalry has provided at least a form of 'justice' in the end. He is, however, born into slavery, like his parents.

In "A Justice" the tribe's doctor is mentioned only negatively, when he fails to arrive in time to "burn sticks" (349) when the Man falls ill and dies.

In "A Justice" Mr. Stokes is referred to as "the manager" (343) of the Compson family farm, overseeing the Negro workers who live in the farm's quarters.

In "A Justice" David Callicoat pilots the steamboat that comes up the river near Doom's Plantation "four times a year" - or as the narrative puts it, he is "the white man who told the steamboat where to swim" (346). Doom's first step in his quest for power is to appropriate the name 'David Callicoat' for himself (347).

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" displays considerable sympathy for the impact of war on women who remain at home while the men in their lives are at the front, going so far as to say that they "died" on the day war was declared (514). This group includes the "mothers and sweethearts" to whom the soldiers write letters from the war (512), and the "three day wives and three-year widows" whom the soldiers marry hastily on their way to the war (514).

Near the end of the First World War, the assignment of the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" is to read letters going from the front back home to make sure they don't reveal any military information. He seems to have real sympathy for both the soldiers and the recipients of "the scrawled, brief pages of transparent and honorable lies to mothers and sweethearts" (512).

These are the "dead pilots" that the title "All the Dead Pilots" refers to, and they are of two kinds: the aviators like Sartoris, who were killed in the First World War, and the ones who physically survived the war but now find themselves alienated from the contemporary society that has moved past their sacrifices. The survivors are said to have "died" psychologically on Armistice Day, living on only in "snapshots hurriedly made, a little dog-eared with the thirteen years" that have elapsed since November 11, 1918.

This senior officer in the R.A.F. squadron in "All the Dead Pilots" seems like a by-the-book kind of soldier; he won't release Sartoris from duty just because Sartoris asks. He does have a sense of humor, though, and at least a working knowledge of history and geography: "the operations officer told him that La Fayette awaited him on the Santerre plateau" (522) - in other words, "get back to work."

This woman runs and probably owns the "estaminet, a 'bit of a pub,'" in a back street of Amiens where 'Toinette works in "All the Dead Pilots" (516). She and the girl are not related to one another, which raises the question of the exact nature of their business arrangement; she apparently knows of 'Toinette's affairs with Sartoris and Spoomer but does not object to them.

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris finds a "bill from [a] London tailor" in "his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring" (530-31). Although nothing more is said about the tailor, the sentence provides an interesting juxtaposition of the upper class clothing he wore when off duty and these "overalls." (The overalls aviators wore while flying, of course, send a very different signal than the overalls poor white and black farmers and farm hands wear in Yoknapatawpha.)

In "All the Dead Pilots," these are the French soldiers in the Amiens estaminet who witness Sartoris' frustration about Spoomer's affair with Antoinette. Knowing no French, he imagines they are "Laughing at me about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there" in a bedroom with her, but being unable to do anything about it because of Spoomer's superior rank (519-20).

"Kit" is the nickname given by the soldiers and aviators in "All the Dead Pilots" to the "girl" Sartoris has in London (514). They derive it, derogatorily, from General Kitchener - "because she had such a mob of soldiers" (514). The narrator and Ffollansbye don't know whether Sartoris knew about her reputation, but they bear witness to Sartoris' rage and grief after she "goes off" with Spoomer (514).

In Sartoris' memory of his training as an aviator in "All the Dead Pilots," this man, who seems like a figure in a tall tale, was injured when "a cadet crashed on top of him" during flying practice in Canada (526).

This soldier with a "raised moustached face" in "All the Dead Pilots" (524) is "drinking from a bottle in a doorway" of the estaminet when Sartoris arrives there in search of Spoomer (522). Sartoris has to fight him in order to leave the place.

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "Anzac major" sends the drunk ambulance driver back to his unit (527). (Anzac, sometimes written ANZAC, stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army," to which many of the Allied troops fighting around Amiens belonged.)

After Sartoris' trick in "All the Dead Pilots," "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, brigadier generals were the second highest ranking in the R.A.F. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, also a brigadier general.

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "young man in spectacles" who "looked like a student" is "dead drunk" when Sartoris takes his ambulance to Amiens (522).

Spoomer's uncle in "All the Dead Pilots" is the "corps commander, the K.G." (513). "K.G." stands for Knight of the Order of the Garter, the most prestigious of Britain's chivalric honors. He is thus clearly a member of the upper class, and according to the narrator, a snob who predicts that the war "will be the making of the army" (513). The narrator seems to attribute his nephew's rank to his influence.

In "All the Dead Pilots," this R.A.F. aviator was flying below Sartoris when the latter was "shot down while in pursuit of duty over enemy lines" and witnessed his death (530).

Major Kaye is the commanding officer of the R.A.F. squadron in "All the Dead Pilots." His letter to Aunt Jenny about Sartoris' death reveals him to be a compassionate man but even more, a very military one. Calling Sartoris Jenny's son instead of her great-nephew, he writes that "The E.A. outnumbered your son and had more height and speed which is our misfortune but no fault of the Government which would give us better machines if they had them which is no satisfaction to you" (530). He takes it for granted that a woman in Mississippi would know what E.A.

Sartoris calls the French woman who leaves him for Spoomer in "All the Dead Pilots" "'Toinette," which we assume is a contracted form of Antoinette. She is a barmaid in a lower-class bar in Amiens and the second woman who has left Sartoris for Spoomer.

In "The Hound" the clerk named Snopes tells Cotton that the man who found his shotgun in the slough where he tried to hide it was "a nigger squirl hunter" (159). When Faulkner re-tells this story in The Hamlet, Cotton is named Mink Snopes, the clerk is named Lump Snopes, and the Negro who "found that durn gun" is fishing instead of hunting - actually, he is "grabbling," in which you try to catch the fish under water with your bare hands (257).

Ernest Cotton is a bachelor and an unsuccessful farmer whose hapless attempt to avenge himself against a more prosperous neighbor is at the center of "The Hound." The narrator describes him as "a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man" (157). He is also a murderer and would-be suicide, though unsuccessful at those as well. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he made Cotton's character a cousin of Flem named Mink Snopes.)

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "The "folks," as Suratt calls the poor farmers and their families in "Spotted Horses" (165), congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.