The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A "big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds" (152), Tom-Tom works as the day fireman for Jefferson's power plant in "Centaur in Brass." A black man of sixty, he has a "new young wife . . . whom he kept with the strictness of a Turk in a cabin two miles from town" (152). His cuckolding by night fireman Turl occasions the "centaur" part of the title of the story.

In "Centaur in Brass," Tom-Tom has been married for about a year to a "high yellow" (i.e. light-skinned) woman much younger than himself (160). She is his third wife. Turl seems to have no trouble in seducing her, despite Tom-Tom's efforts to "keep her with the strictness of a Turk" (152), i.e. away from other men as if she were in a harem.

In "Centaur in Brass" the Jefferson mayor Hoxey who is reportedly having an affair with Mrs. Flem Snopes is named Hoxey; according to town gossip, this 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.

After "eliminating" his partner, Flem Snopes procures a "hired manager" to run his restaurant (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.)

This story briefly mentions the various, unnamed individuals who purchase the wild mustang ponies that Flem Snopes and "the broad-hatted stranger" bring to Yoknapatawpha from Texas. This event is the focus of Faulkner's story "The Spotted Horses," published a year before "Centaur in Brass"; he tells it again in The Hamlet.

"Centaur in Brass" describes how the "broad-hatted stranger" accompanies Flem Snopes home to Jefferson from Texas (150). The broad hat and Texas associate him with the idea of the cowboy, but the way he rides into Yoknapatawpha, takes advantage of the men of Frenchman's Bend, "collects the money" for the "half-wild horses" he manipulates them into buying, "and departs" is a kind of ironic inversion of the typical 'cowboy' plot in American westerns.

Known as “V.K. Suratt,” or simply “Suratt,” in some of Faulkner’s early fiction, and as "V.K. Ratliff" in the Snopes trilogy, this character plays only a small role in "Centaur in Brass." A traveling sewing-machine salesman, he is the only person in town who has had firsthand financial experience with Flem Snopes. Suratt is a shrewd businessman; but he openly admits that Flem "outsmarted" him in their deal, and he now speaks of Flem "in a tone of savage and sardonic and ungrudging admiration" (150) while sounding the warning as to the kind of danger Flem can pose.

Though this text doesn't say so, readers of the Snopes trilogy know that the "well-grown baby" girl (149-50) that Mrs. Snopes brings back to Yoknapatawpha from Texas is named Linda. Her father is identified in The Hamlet as Hoake McCarron. Linda herself plays a major role in the later parts of the trilogy. In this short story, however, this "baby" is merely referred to - though the text's references to Mrs. Snopes' "sudden marriage" as well as that reference to "well-grown" should alert readers to the fact that the "baby" is illegitimate (149).

Never given a first or maiden name in this story, Flem's wife was "the belle of the countryside" when they married (149). As her story is told in the short story "Spotted Horses" (1931) and retold with much more attention to her character in The Hamlet (1940), Eula Varner became Mrs. Flem Snopes when she became pregnant with another man's child; in return, her father gave him the Old Frenchman place as "a portion of [her] dowry" (150). After an extended honeymoon in Texas, surely timed to mask the date of the child's birth, the couple moves to Jefferson and takes over V.K.