The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The county sheriff is described as "past middle-age," "a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt" who smokes a corn cob pipe (156). At first he seems more concerned with his "supper" than with investigating Houston's disappearance (158), but that seems at least in part a disguise. He figures out how to identify and capture the killer, and transports him to jail with both professional care and human respect, while making sure that they eat on the way and also will be "home for supper" on time (163).

Since the story begins with Houston's murder, we know him only through what Cotton thinks and other characters say about him. According to that evidence, he is "as well-fixed as ere a man in the county," a "bachelor" who owned his own farm and "made a good crop every year" (156). While they call him "a secret man," the men who discuss him at Varner's store cannot imagine why he would have chosen to disappear from the area (157).

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 this story. 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.)

Louvinia, a house slave before and during the Civil War, serves as the cook for the Sartoris family. She and her husband Joby are the head of the family of slaves who have served the Sartorises for several generations and who (with the exception of Loosh) stay loyal to them even after the Union army has passed through Yoknapatawpha, which gave most of the slaves in the area a chance to escape. Louvinia continues to work for the family after the War has ended and she has been emancipated.

Referred to by both Bayard and Ringo as Granny, Rosa Millard is one of Faulkner's most formidable old women. She is Louisa Hawks sister and John Sartoris' mother-in-law. In The Unvanquished, readers see her bringing up the boys, managing the plantation during the Civil War, and finding a way to provide for the people of Yoknapatawpha by outsmarting the Yankees.

In time the commander-in-chief of the Union Army and then President of the U.S., Ulysses S. Grant was in the early 1860s in charge of the campaign against Mississippi, especially Vicksburg.

John Clifford Pemberton grew up in Pennsylvania. He married a Virginian, however, which may explain how he became the Confederate commander in Mississippi during the first half of the War. He was in charge with the defense of Vicksburg. After battling the forces of Ulyssess S. Grant, Pemberton was forced to surrender at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.

Earl Van Dorn was a Major General who led Confederate forces during much of the fighting in Mississippi until he was murdered on May 7, 1863, by George Peters, who claimed that Van Dorn had an affair with his wife.