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Code title biography
3192 Unnamed Slave of German Blacksmith

In Requiem for a Nun the slave "belonging to the German blacksmith" is one of the men who help to build the courthouse (24).

3191 Unnamed Sexual Partners of Nancy

In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute.

3190 Unnamed Early Settlers

At various points in its prose history of Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson, Requiem for a Nun refers to the settlers who followed the frontier pioneers into the new land. There is some overlap in its representation of this group, and in the terms - frontier, pioneer - used to categorize them.

3189 Unnamed Salesgirls in Memphis

In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112).

3188 Unnamed Riverboat Gambler

According to the history of Jackson recounted in Requiem for a Nun, as the territory became more settled, the "steamboat gambler" replaced the keelboatman as "the river hero" (83). Since the gambler is only seen being put off the steamboat and "marooned" on a small island, the term "hero" is presumably freighted with irony (83).

3187 Unnamed Returning Confederates

The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184).

3186 Unnamed Reader

Near the end of the third prose section of Requiem for a Nun, the narrator looks up from the story he is telling to address the reader directly as "you" (198). He identifies the reader as "a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West" (198), and speculates that "you" may be college educated, or "perhaps even" have an graduate degree from "Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205). This second person plays a significant if rhetorical role in the way the history of Yoknapatawpha is ultimately evoked.

3185 Unnamed Performers on Radio

The representation of modernity in Requiem for a Nun includes "the boom and ululance of radio," represented by the voices that are heard on it: "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists" (192).

3184 Unnamed Negro Preacher 2

Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends.

3183 Unnamed Modern Planter

In Requiem for a Nun this 20th-century "planter" is a generic figure whose fate suggests the kinds of changes that have occurred in Yoknapatawpha: where once he had slaves and then tenants to work his fields, after his "son" is drafted in the second World War it is the planter himself who does that, riding "on the seat of his tractor" (193).

3182 Unnamed Participants in Nancy's Trial

In the play's first scene in Requiem for a Nun, "a section of the court" is represented on stage, and the stage directions list "the judge, officers, the opposing lawyers, the jury" (39). The "judge" and one of the officers - the bailiff - speak in the scene, and so have their own Character entries. This entry represents the other men referred to, though it's unlikely that any production of the play would cast actors to represent the "opposing lawyers" or "the jury" on stage.

3181 Unnamed New Settlers

According to the history of Jefferson provided by Requiem for a Nun, soon after the first whites arrive in Yoknapatawpha come these "new" settlers: "new names and faces too in the settlement now - faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible antecedents other than mammalinity nor past other than the simple years which had scored them" (12).

3180 Unnamed Negro Who Kicks Nancy

All we know about referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "the man who kicked" Nancy and caused her miscarriage is that he might have been the unborn child's father (219). Because the assault happened at "a picnic or dance or frolic or fight" and Nancy would not have been allowed to attend a gathering of whites, we are assuming this man is black (219).

3179 Unnamed Negro Residents of Jefferson

There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190).

3178 Unnamed Negro Leaders

According to the narrator of Requiem for a Nun, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87).

3177 Unnamed Negro Iceman

Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.)

3176 Unnamed Aboriginals 2

The narrator of Requiem for a Nun begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi.

3175 Unnamed Mohammedan Prince

One of the more exotic characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this "Mohammedan" prince has a "European mistress" in Requiem for a Nun; he never appears in the novel, but is mentioned as the man who built the "hideway" in the south of France where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens take their honeymoon (122).

3174 Unnamed Mississippi Legislators 1

According to the account of the development of Mississippi from wilderness to civilization in Requiem for a Nun, "the politicians" follow the "land speculators" (172). The novel's history of the place that became Jackson more specifically notes the role the legislature played in creating a new state capital after the Mississippi territory achieved statehood in 1817, though it also notes, wryly, how at various later moments "the Senate" and "the House" alternately sought to change the location (85-86).

3173 Unnamed Mississippi Indians 2

Requiem for a Nun lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising.

3172 Unnamed Militia Band

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these militia men are "part of a general muster at the settlement . . . for a Fourth of July barbeque" (201, 5). Like stereotypical frontiersmen, they are soon "ejected" from town for their "drunken brawling" (201, 5-6). After running into and capturing a gang of bandits, they return to the settlement in hopes of claiming a reward; instead, they are eventually locked up with the outlaws they had captured.

3171 Unnamed Stonemasons 1

In Requiem for a Nun the "masons who erect" the Confederate statue in Courthouse Square are mentioned, but not described (189). They should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the secret society who are mentioned in The Town.

3170 Unnamed Land Speculators and Traders

In Requiem for a Nun this group of "land speculators" and "traders in slaves and whiskey" follow the pioneers into Mississippi (172-73).

3169 Unnamed Japanese-American Soldiers

In Requiem for a Nun the German tank gun that serves as Jefferson's monument to the men who served in World War II was captured "by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms," the sons of interned Japanese Americans (194). (Over 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, many in the 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.)

3168 Unnamed Interned Japanese Americans

As noted in Requiem for a Nun, during World War II the U.S. government interned over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them US citizens) as "enemy aliens" (194). Most of these people had been living on the west coast, and all the interment camps they were taken to were west of the Mississippi.

3167 Unnamed Inhabitants of Jefferson

In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190).

3166 Unnamed Wild Indians and Whites

The Mississippi wilderness in Requiem for a Nun is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (10).

3165 Unnamed Hotel Residents

Out of towners who stay at "the hotel" in Jefferson are categorized in Requiem for a Nun as "drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses" (189). "Drummers" are traveling salesmen.

3164 Unnamed Heirs of Louis Grenier

In Requiem for a Nun the "heirs" of Louis Grenier are briefly mentioned in connection with a financial legacy he left the town (35).

3163 Unnamed Enslaved Footman 2

According to the account of Yoknapatawpha's history in Requiem for a Nun, the first slaves were brought into the county by Louis Grenier. This enslaved "coachman" is one of the two Grenier slaves who appear in the narrative when Grenier drives his "imported carriage" into Jefferson to see the construction of the new courthouse.

3162 Unnamed Enslaved Coachman 2

According to the account of Yoknapatawpha's history in Requiem for a Nun, the first slaves were brought into the county by Louis Grenier. This "slave coachman" is one of the two Grenier slaves who appear in the narrative when Grenier drives into Jefferson to see the construction of the new courthouse. The other settlers expect the two slaves to help with that work, but Compson invokes "the rigid protocol of bondage" - that is, the unwritten rules that govern master-slave relations - and says no "stable-servant" like the coachman can be ordered to do "manual labor" (27).

3160 Unnamed Grandmother of Cecilia Farmer

This "grandmother" appears in Requiem for a Nun only to explain how Cecilia Farmer inscribes her own name and the date on a pane of glass in the jail: she uses her grandmother's diamond ring (182).

3159 Unnamed Governor's Lieutenant

Referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "one" of the Governor's "lieutenants," this man was taken to court in a paternity suit (196).

3158 Unnamed German Carpetbagger

Like another of the earliest settlers in Jefferson mentioned in Requiem for a Nun, this man is "German" and a "blacksmith" (183), but they are very different figures. This man is one of the "carpetbaggers" who come to Jefferson at the end of the Civil War, a deserter from the Union Army who arrives "riding a mule" and, according to the tales that were later told about him, bringing with him "for saddle-blanket sheaf on sheaf of virgin and uncut United States banknotes" - no doubt nefariously obtained (183).

3157 Unnamed German Blacksmith

Among the first settlers in Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun is a man referred to as "the German blacksmith"; all that is known about him, however, is that he is one of the few white men in the original settlement who owns a slave (24).

3156 Unnamed Frenchmen

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Frenchman" alternated with "the Spaniard" for possession and control of the area (81). Historically, this land was claimed and ruled over by France several different times during the 18th century.

3155 Unnamed Freedmen

In Requiem for a Nun the people who were formerly enslaved in Jackson and elsewhere are referred to, tangentially, in the negative characterization of the Federal officials who administered the post-war attempt at Reconstruction: they are the "freed slaves" whose votes those "carpet-baggers" know how to manipulate (87). Presumably this group also includes the students who attend Jackson's three "College[s] for Negroes"; the colleges are mentioned in the text but not the people who attend them (87).

3154 Unnamed Federal Army Provost-Marshals

The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun treats the "Federal provost-marshals" who came to the defeated South charged with protecting the rights of the slaves who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War according to the then-popular pro-Southern accounts of Reconstruction: the elections they preside over are described as corrupted by carpetbaggers (87).

3153 Unnamed Federal Army Provost-Marshal 2

In Requiem for a Nun the jail is used as the "provost-marshal's guard-house" during the Union occupation of Jefferson during the Civil War (196); a provost marshal is in charge of a unit of military police.

3152 Unnamed Federal Marshal

In Requiem for a Nun this man attends Mohataha and the Chickasaws' removal from Yoknapatawpha along with the "Federal land agent" (170).

3151 Unnamed Federal Land-Agent

This man and "his marshal" are on hand when Mohataha and her people leave Yoknapatawpha for the "Indian Territory" in the "West" - presumably to make the Chickasaws' 'removal' official, though Requiem for a Nun does not specifically mention the Removal (170).

3150 Unnamed Exchange Students

In Requiem for a Nun these "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194). Calling out-of-state students "exchange students" is an odd formulation, suggesting that 'the North' they come from is essentially a different country - as of course it would have been to the Confederates who originally carried those flags during the Civil War.

3149 Unnamed European Mistress

She is the "European mistress" of the "Mohammedan prince" in Requiem for a Nun who built the "hideaway where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens honeymoon (122).

3148 Unnamed Enslaved Girl 2

In Requiem for a Nun this "female slave child" sits next to Mohataha in her wagon, holding "the crusted slippers" that originally came from France (170).

3147 Unnamed Enslaved Girl 1

Owned by Mohataha, the matriarch of the Chickasaws in Requiem for a Nun, this "Negro slave girl" holds "a French parasol" over her master when Mohataha comes to town in a wagon (169).

3146 Unnamed Descendants of Modern Planter

In its account of modern changes in Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun focuses on the generational experience of the "son" of the large plantation, who goes to World War II from "the seat of the tractor" with which he, rather than his father's tenants, works the land; upon his return he leaves behind "the long monotonous endless unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields" to live with his wife and growing family "in automobile trailers of G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges" (193).

3145 Unnamed Inmates 3

The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that at least in Requiem for a Nun this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race.

3144 Unnamed Confederate Officer

In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).

3143 Unnamed Civic Officials

Requiem for a Nun notes when the "sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk" (35), the "bailiffs" (36), and the other officials of Jefferson occupy the newly constructed courthouse (35).

3142 Unnamed Chippeway Indians

In Requiem for a Nun, these are the eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. It seems likely that at least some of them, like the canoes they traveled in, are Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada.

3141 Unnamed Children of Pioneers and Indians

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Anglo-Saxon" pioneer not only fought the Indians he found in the territory; he also fathered children on some of them: "scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness" (81-82). "Dusky bellies" is ambiguous, but almost certainly refers to Indian women. And while miscegenation between black and white in Faulkner's world made one a 'Negro' and socially inferior, it was common for 'white' southerners to boast of a Native American ancestor on the family tree.

3140 Unnamed Anglo-Saxon Pioneers

The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).

3139 Unnamed Ancestors of Temple Drake

When Temple Drake Stevens describes her ancestors to Gavin Stevens, she mockingly points to "long lines of statesmen and soldiers high in the proud annals of our sovereign state" (95).

3138 Unnamed Alabama Farmer

In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182).

3137 Pete

Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132).

3136 Commissioner Patton

A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, Patton became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

3135 General McClellan

The "McClellan" who earns a spot on the list in Requiem for a Nun of the Civil War generals on both sides who heard the "shrill hackle-lifting" rebel yell in battle (188) is Union General George McClellan, commander-in-chief of the army that faced Lee during the early months of the Civil War.

3134 Nancy Mannigoe

As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed.

3133 Leflore

Greenwood Leflore (as Requiem for a Nun spells his name, though LeFlore is historically more accurate) was the son of Rebecca Cravatt, the daughter of a Choctaw chief (not mentioned in the novel), and Louis LeFleur, a French Canadian fur trader. He was educated by white Americans in Nashville.

3132 Le Fleur

Louis LeFleur was a French Canadian voyageur, or explorer. The "trading-post store" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun on the bluffs above the Pearl River became the seed for the city of Jackson (84). He married a local Choctaw, the daughter of a chief, and had a son named Greenwood Le Flore, who also appears in the novel's cast of characters.

3131 Commissioner Lattimore

A physician by training, William Lattimore was politically active during the years in which the Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi. In 1821, along with James Patton and Thomas Hinds, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

3130 Governor Humphries

Benjamin Humphreys (Faulkner misspells his name in Requiem for a Nun) was a Southern officer during the Civil War who turned to politics during Reconstruction. In October, 1865, he was elected Governor of Mississippi as a Democrat. As an unpardoned Confederate he was ineligible to serve by the terms of surrender, so he had himself inaugurated and sworn in. In June, 1868, Federal troops were used forcibly to remove him from office. He was a strong advocate of Jim Crow laws as a way to deny freed slaves their rights as citizens.

3129 Commissioner Hinds

Thomas Hinds was a hero of the War of 1812 who afterward commanded the Mississippi territorial militia. After Mississippi gained statehood in 1817 he turned to politics, serving in the state legislature and later in the U.S. Congress. In 1821, along with James Patton and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

3128 Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was the American writer whom Faulkner considered his rival for most of his career, though the two men had a cordial long distance relationship and Faulkner often alluded to or quoted from Hemingway in public statements. In Requiem for a Nun Temple alludes to Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to explain that a woman who has been sexually assaulted could be in denial that it had happened to her: "it had never actually happened to a g-- woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged" (121).

3127 Governor Henry

Referred to in the script as "GOVERNOR" and addressed, by Gavin, only by his first name - "Henry" (90) - the man who meets with Gavin and Temple in Act II of Requiem for a Nun to hear an informal appeal on behalf of Nancy is referred to as "the last, the ultimate seat of judgment" (89). In the stage directions he is identified not with Mississippi but with a "mythical" State, "the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit" (89) - though elsewhere in the novel there is no ambiguity about the literary 'fact' that Yoknapatawpha is in Mississippi.

3126 Mike Fink

Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.

3125 Jailer Farmer

Ironically, the "turnkey" or "jailor" in Jefferson during the Civil War in Requiem for a Nun is "a failed farmer," who secures the position through political influence (179).

3124 Famous Mississippians

At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.

3123 Buzzard Egglestone

Beroth Egglestone is a real man who served in the Civil War as a Union General. Afterwards he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains how he acquired the unflattering sobriquet that Requiem for a Nun uses to refer to him: "Buzzard" (87).

3122 Drake, Brothers of Temple

Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)

3121 Abraham DeFrance

According to Requiem for a Nun, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938).

3120 Henry Clay

Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 (referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi.

3119 Governor Claiborne

In Requiem for a Nun Governor (William C.C.) Claiborne was the "Territorial Governor" of Louisiana, the land the U.S. acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, from 1804 to 1812 (85).

3118 General Burnside

The "Burnside" who makes the list of men who heard the "hackle-lifting" rebel yell in Requiem for a Nun had command of the Union Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

3117 General Bee

"Bee" (Bernard Elliott Bee, Jr.) was a newly appointed general from South Carolina when the battle of "First Manassas" was fought (36); although Requiem for a Nun does not mention it, he was mortally wounded during the fighting there.

3116 Unnamed Young Men of Ikkemotubbe

In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

3115 Unnamed Would-be Lynchers

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, as soon as the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (206, 11).

3114 Unnamed Wilderness Outlaws

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, these "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200, 4). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204, 9).

3113 Unnamed Pioneers and Settlers

During the time covered by "A Name for the City," the white settlement that becomes Jefferson is first occupied by two men and a boy who are given names by the narrator and their own character entries in our database - see Doctor Habersham, Doctor Habersham's Son and Alexander Holston. This entry represents the next two generations or at least phases of inhabitants, the men who can called pioneers and settlers.

3112 Unnamed Greek Child

According to Uncle Gavin in "A Name for the City," this child provides useful and necessary assistance to the magnificent Greek poet, Homer.

3111 Unnamed Circumnavigators

In "A Name for the City" Gavin Stevens refers to the "world travelers" who made history by circumnavigating the globe, from the first ones, who did it in "three years" (he is referring to Magellan's voyage in a sailing ship, 1519-1522), to the ones who did it in "ninety hours" (he is referring to the crew of the US Air Force B-50 bomber who made the trip in 1949); Gavin wrongly adds that "now" - when the story was published, presumably - the feat has been accomplished in "thirty hours" (200).

3110 Unnamed Brawlers and Drunkards

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).

3109 Unnamed Aviator 2

Invented by Gavin Stevens in "A Name for the City," this aviator aspires to be the latest individual to set a new speed record for traveling around the world. Stevens gives him elementary emotions and diction, suggesting that a lack of respect for such an individual.

3108 Murrell's Gang

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts.

3107 Homer

Homer is the classic Greek epic poet to whom The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed. His blindness is part of his mythic status. To Gavin Stevens, Homer is proof of what mankind can achieve: despite his disability, he "charted the ultimate frontiers of passion and defeat and glory and ambition and courage and hope and fear" (200).

3106 Harpe Brothers

During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail.

3105 Unnamed Farmers 6

These Yoknapatawpha farmers are part of "Knight's Gambit" in two ways. As a larger group, they become part of the audience that watches as Mr. Harriss transforms a traditional county plantation into a kind of Hollywood set. Some of them cross "the whole county" to watch the landscapers and builders at work (161), and "farmers" are specifically included in the groups of spectators who attend the sporting events that are staged there (163).

3104 Unnamed World War I Soldiers 2

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)

3103 Unnamed Whites in Jefferson

The "white people" who live by the railroad tracks in Jefferson's "purlieus" don't live in "cabins," a word they associate with the Negroes in a nearby neighborhood - a distinction, the narrative says, they will "fight" to maintain (252-53). Their sense of insecurity suggests that their own social and economic status is not much above that of the blacks who are almost their neighbors.

3102 Unnamed Tutors

In "Knight's Gambit" the tutors employed to educate the Harriss children at home are described, with some irony, as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145).

3101 Unnamed Translator

In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison says that "without doubt" Gualdres must have used an "interpreter" to him help him enlist in the U.S. Army in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war (254).

3100 Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 4

"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163).

3099 Unnamed Telegram Delivery Boy 3

This "boy" delivers Markey's telegram to Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" (208). Most delivery boys and men in the fictions are black, which would give additional possible meaning to the term "boy," but since Faulkner does not specify this character's race - and based on the character who delivers telegrams to Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury - we assume this one is white.

3098 Unnamed Smugglers

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).

3097 Unnamed Secretary

According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). It seems likely that, even if Harriss died in a different way, the "secretary" referred to here exists, and did make this call to Mrs. Harris, who is in Europe at the time her husband dies.

3096 Unnamed Russian Woman

The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

3095 Unnamed Railroad Engineer 1

In "Knight's Gambit" this is the engineer of the train Charles Mallison is taking to preflight training; he "blows the whistle at" Charles because he is holding up the train's departure (257) .

3094 Unnamed Private Detective

Although he is something of a private detective himself, Gavin Stevens hires this private detective to surveil Max Harriss in Memphis; as he puts it, "A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it" (201).

3093 Unnamed Original Owner of Dangerous Horse

In "Knight's Gambit" Rafe McCallum acquires the horse that Max Harriss buys from "some owner" who may have "ruined" it by trying "to break its spirit by fear or violence"; it is rumored that McCallum bought the horse "because its owner wanted to destroy it" (210-11).

3092 Unnamed Operators

Passing through Jefferson from preflight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators" (251). "Operators" here seems to mean 'managers.'

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