The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Grumby is the leader of Grumby's Independents, an irregular group that took advantage of the Civil War to ravage and terrorize the Mississippi countryside. He figures prominently in The Unvanquished, where the story of his murder of Rosa Millard is told.

Stamper's partner in crime, the hostler is a "magician" (38) and an "artist" who could take any "piece of horseflesh" and change its appearance so that the "beast's own dam would not recognize" (33). Although he is not named in The Hamlet, in "Fool About a Horse" his name is "Jim."

Stamper is a legendary ruthless horse trader who has "eyes the color of a new axe blade" (33). Ratliff marvels that Stamper doesn't just trade horses, but arrived "a stranger" and "got actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" (37) by swindling Ab Snopes in a series of trades. Pat Stamper originally appeared in the story "Fool About a Horse" (1936). This story is retold by Ratliff in The Hamlet to explain how Ab Snopes became "soured."

The Negro whom Ratliff refers to simply as "a nigger" (32) is given both a name and a major role to play in The Unvanquished stories. His name is Ringo, or Marengo. Born a slave, he grows up as the personal servant and close companion of Bayard Sartoris, and in the scene that Ratliff describes elliptically - "something else happened" - actually uses a whip to beat a white man, Ab Snopes (see "Vendee").

Only son of the legendary Colonel John Sartoris, Bayard escapes the "curse" that befalls all the males of his family, a violent and early death. With the death of his father, he inherits the Sartoris estate and becomes one of the leading citizens in Jefferson. In The Hamlet, Ratliff mentions the "Colonel's boy Bayard" in connection with Ab Snopes' past (32).

The mother-in-law of Colonel John Sartoris and one of Faulkner's legendary strong women, Rosa Millard appears in this novel as part of Ab Snopes' biography. Her death during the Civil War at the hands of an outlaw "who calls his self Major Grumby" is a result of her "horse- and mule-partnership" with Ab (32)- a story that is told fully in The Unvanquished.

Ratliff's father was a tenant farmer, who at one time worked on land owned by "old man Anse Holland" next to parcel that Ab Snopes was sharecropping on (29).

Like the Sartorises, the McCaslins are planters who were among the first white settlers of Yoknapatawpha; they are at the center of the later novel, Go Down, Moses (1942), in which readers learn that Uncle Buck's real name is Theophilus and he is Ike McCaslin’s father. In The Hamlet, Uncle Buck serves as one of the sources for Ratliff's stories.

Legendary progenitor of the Sartoris family and one of the central characters in Yoknapatawpha's history, he plays a peripheral role in The Hamlet. According to one of the novel's two versions of Ab's wounded leg, it was Sartoris who shot him "for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the War" (18), and the two men are juxtaposed when Ratliff says that while the Colonel was "building his railroad," Ab was forced to hide "back in the hills" for his role in the killing of Rosa Millard, the Colonel's mother-in-law (32).

Major de Spain owns the land in Yoknapatawpha to which Abner Snopes moves after he leaves Harris. The De Spains are another of Yoknapatawpha's aristocratic families, and a "Major de Spain" appears in or is mentioned in over a dozen of Faulkner's works. Figuring out the De Spain lineage, however, is often difficult or impossible. This De Spain is probably the one who actually was a Confederate Major during the Civil War.