The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Sam Fathers' mother was a slave, the one woman a group of six slaves whom Doom won gambling on a steamboat traveling from New Orleans. She is married to one of the other five. But when she arrives in Mississippi, one of the Indians, Craw-ford or Sam's "pappy," wants to take her for himself. Although a slave, her husband protests. She herself is treated as property during the story, as Doom arbitrates the two men's battle over her, and she bears a child fathered by each man.

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).

Doom was born "Ikkemotubbe" (346), but in the story he is mainly called by the name he prefers, Doom, which he acquired from a Frenchman in New Orleans, where he spends seven years. Earlier he had renamed himself David Callicoat (346), appropriating the name of a steamboat pilot. But his real ambition is to be "the Man," the chief of the Choctaw tribe in the story, even though, as descended from the Man's sister, he is not in the line of succession (346). According to his uncle, the reigning chief, even as a boy Doom has "a bad eye" (346).

A "whisky-trader" who visits Doom's plantation "each summer" (346), he is the only white man Sam Fathers sees until he is twelve years old. Presumably he trades moonshine whiskey to the Indians, in exchange for animal skins or other commodities. ("Whisky" is the way it's spelled in this story, though in many other texts Faulkner writes "whiskey.")

Miss Reba runs one of Memphis' best-known houses of prostitution. She is twenty years younger in this novel than in Sanctuary, where she first appears, and a much warmer person. Lucius describes her at first as "a young woman . . . with a kind hard handsome face and hair that was too red" (96). She is hard on the man she lives with, or at least on his failings, and also a hard drinker, and knows how to exert her authority as a prominent and wealthy woman, but in this story she uses that power selflessly.

"Miss Corrie," as she is called when Lucius first meets her (99) - or "Everbe," as he calls her after learning later in the narrative that her given names are "Everbe Corinthia" (153) - was born in Kiblett, Arkansas. After her mother's death, her foster-mother put her to work as a prostitute "as soon as she was big enough" (154). She is, Lucius notes when he first meets her at Miss Reba's, "a big girl," "still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain" (99).

Introduced into the story as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. Lucius calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives). Lucius' mother wants her children to call him "Uncle" Ned.

"Tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable; he was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had the mentality of a child" (18) - this is how Lucius as narrator sums up the man whose love of a car and a Memphis prostitute lead them together into the misadventures recounted in the novel. Readers of the Yoknapatawpha fictions meet Boon earlier in the context of hunting; most notably, he is the man who kills Old Ben, the bear in "The Bear." In this novel he figures as the impulsive giant who both serves and is taken care of by Yoknapatawpha's aristocrats.