Character Keys

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "Centaur in Brass" takes place after Flem Snopes comes to town, and doesn't provide a name for the place he comes from, though the references to the "country store" (149) and the auction of "a herd of half-wild mustang ponies" (150) identifies the place as the Bend.

When Bayard remembers church services before the Civil War in "The Unvanquished" and again in The Unvanquished, he recalls that "the bishop" visited the church in Yoknapatawpha at least once; the bishop's official ring "looked big as a pistol target" (86, 137). "Episcopal" as a word derives from the idea of bishops; in the hierarchy of the Episcopal religion, a Bishop would preside over churches spread across a large area.

The narrator of "Smoke" refers briefly to "the presiding judge during court term" when describing how one can gain entry into Judge Dukinfield's office (14). It's not clear if this is a rotating or a permanent position.

In Sanctuary Horace Benbow tells Ruby Lamar that she can "always get me by telephone, at ------," and gives her "the name of a neighbor" that the narrative withholds from us (201). This is that neighbor. (In Flags in the Dust the Benbows' neighbors are named Wyatt; there's no obvious reason for Faulkner's coyness about the neighbor in this novel.)

The Town contains two different kinds of lists of the old (white) Yoknapatawpha families. The first such list is constructed by Gavin Stevens as he reflects on the county's history, and unlike the second list in this novel or the kind of role Faulkner provides elsewhere, Gavin's thoughts include the early lower class settlers as well as "the proud fading white plantation names" like "Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham" (332).

These are the people who live "in houses [and] cabins ten and fifteen miles away" from Lonnie Grinnup's shack (71). According to "Hand Upon the Waters," Lonnie Grinnup and Joe periodically visit them, sometimes "for weeks" - the story simply refers to them as "his hosts" (71). They mostly seem to be farmers, since Lonnie and Joe sometimes sleep in "the hay of lofts," but some of them at least are prosperous enough to have "company rooms" with "beds" to sleep in (71).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin associates "Washington not telling lies" with "Jesus walking on Galilee" (80). Jesus walks on water in the New Testament. The mythic claim that even as a boy George Washington, the first President of the U.S., 'could not tell a lie' was created by an early biographer and educator named Parson Weems, who thought that the story of young Washington and the cherry tree he chopped down would be edifying for the young men of the early American republic. Weems himself could tell a lie.

Herbert Head mentions "a little widow over in town" when he is trying to ingratiate himself with Caddy's brother Quentin (110). The "town" is presumably Boston, "over" the river from Harvard. Although it has been suggested that Head is talking about a prostitute, the idea of 'the college widow' as an unmarried woman who dates a succession of students over the years was proverbial in both 1910 (when the conversation takes place) and 1929 (when The Sound and the Fury was published).

In The Reivers Sam Caldwell's uncle is a "division superintendent" on the railroad line Same works for (130). A typical division superintendent is in charge of a fairly large section of a railroad company's track.

These are the men Lucius in The Reivers calls "drummers," a term Faulkner expected his readers to know meant traveling salesmen (8). Taking them back and forth between the railroad station and the hotel is a steady source of business for Maury Priest's livery stable.

This is the group of men that Lucius refers to in The Reivers, ironically, as "our Jefferson leisure class": the "friends or acquaintances of Father's or maybe just friends of horses" who congregate in the livery stable to pass the time (38). They expect neither "any business" nor "any mail" to come their way (38). In other Yoknapatawpha novels such men typically sit in the barbershop or the park around the courthouse.

Grandfather Priest hires this tinsmith in The Reivers to make both a toolbox and a "smell-tight" gasoline can for his new automobile (65).

In The Reivers the motorman the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the conductor (93).

In an aside in The Reivers to his grandson about "that Cause" - i.e. the Civil War - Lucius refers to "your spinster aunts," and differentiates his idea about the War from theirs (228). Elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, such women are identified with a refusal to surrender the 'Lost Cause,' to admit either defeat or the flaws of the Old South, but what these aunts stand for here is not clear.

In The Reivers, the "collateral descending nephews and cousins" of the young man Colonel Sartoris killed consider Sartoris a "murderer" (73).

The "steward and marshal" at the races in The Reivers is a local "dog trainer" and hunter who is out on bail awaiting trial for "a homicide which had occurred last winter at a neighboring whiskey still" (229).

One of the two "ladies, girls" whom Lucius sees at supper in Miss Reba's in The Reivers (106). Lucius distinguishes them by their clothes - one wears "a red dress," and the other is "in pink" - and their age: one is a "girl" and the other is "no longer a girl" (106-07). This is the younger one, who complains about having to be so quiet on Sundays.

Though their farms are "bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns" than those on the Mississippi side of Hell Creek, the Tennessee country people whom the travelers pass on the broad road that leads to Memphis in The Reivers are also "still in their Sunday clothes," sitting on their front porches ("galleries"), watching the world go by (91). And when they get closer to the city, "even the little children" who live along the road are no longer excited by the sight of a car (92).

In The Reivers Lucius describes the men who crowd around the race track and bet on the races as "the same overalls, tieless, the sweated hats, the chewing tobacco" that he associated with the men in the hotel dining room that morning (227). But a major difference is that this crowd is racially unsegregated: "people, black and white" (228). One member of this crowd leads Lightning to the starting line after Ned is disqualified. "People" could imply women, of course, but until Minnie arrives at the end of the third race, there is no evidence of them at the track.

This "tenant on a farm six miles from town" in The Reivers is either the father or the husband of the woman Ludus is romancing (10).

The cook at the Parsham hotel is described in The Reivers as "a tremendous Negro woman" (199).

Identified in The Reivers only as "a Negro," this man works for Mr. Rouncewell and pumps gasoline into the (few) cars that pull up to the tank beside the railroad tracks (46). He is not allowed to handle any money.

In The Reivers Boon brags to this "group of men on the Square" about how fast he can make the car go (40). Many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions include a reference to the un- or under-employed men who hang around the Courthouse during the day; presumably these men are of that variety.

In his account in The Reivers of the first time Coppermine (AKA Forked Lightning) raced against Acheron, Parsham Hood briefly mentions "that Memphis boy" who was riding the horse (220).

In The Reivers Lucius Priest tells his grandson (also named Lucius Priest) that when their common ancestor Lucius McCaslin came to Mississippi in 1813, he brought "his slaves and foxhounds" with him "across the mountains from Carolina" (61). Presumably one of these enslaved people is the grandmother of Ned McCaslin, who has her own Character entry; otherwise this novel says nothing more about these people. More about some of them, at least, can be found in Faulkner's earlier novel, Go Down, Moses.

These are the employees of Priest's livery stable in addition to the five who are mentioned by name. The Reivers characterizes them as "all the Negro drivers and hostlers" and "the last lowly stall cleaner" (7). Besides the day and night foremen, apparently the only white employee is Dan Grinnup.

In The Reivers Lucius has heard that the place he knew as Ballenbaugh's "is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger" (71). (It was illegal to buy or sell alcohol in Mississippi until 1966.)

In The Reivers these people from elsewhere would accompany the wealthy businessman and hunter Paul Rainey on his trips to hunt "bear and deer and panther" in Mississippi (163).

In The Reivers Lucius' description of the men who attend the annual hunting dog competitions in Parsham brings together the lower class South ("overalled aficionados") and the upper class North ("northern millionaires") and includes "the professionals who trained the fine bird dogs" (163).

In The Reivers Nat warns Otis about his behavior by mentioning "a boy like you back there in Jefferson" who is now in "the state penitentiary at Parchman" (139-40). It's not clear whether he is thinking of an actual person, or inventing one to threaten Otis.

"All" of Mr. and Mrs. Poleymus' children "are married and gone"; The Reivers does not say how many they had, or where they went (251).

Besides the immediate Priest family, Aunt Callie, Delphine and "our various connections and neighbors and Grandmother's close friends" and "one or two neighbor children" all take turns riding in the car whenever Boon takes it out in The Reivers (37, 41).

In The Reivers Lucius Priest mentions "all the other boys on the street" he lives on (3). During May they play baseball on Saturdays.

This woman in The Reivers one of Jefferson's more colorful residents, and not just because of her "brassy" (or orange-red) hair (25). Coming "from nowhere" and staying only "briefly," during the 1930s she transforms the "Snopes Hotel" into a place known to "the police" as "Little Chicago" (254). Presumably Lucius' reference to her as a "gentlewoman" is ironic (25): given Chicago's association in the popular mind at that time with the underworld, her boarding house must have been a fairly wild place.

This entry represents the group that Lucius refers to in The Reivers when he wonders how heroic his role in the story really is. If the Negro Bobo has the automobile, he thinks, then all the adventurers would have to do to get it back is "send one of the family colored boys to fetch it" (224). These "boys" don't ever appear in the narrative, and it's not clear what "family" they are connected with - McCaslin? Priest? Edmonds?

In The Reivers the "twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth" who was killed by Colonel John Sartoris cannot be specifically identified (73). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Sartoris kills a number of different men. If Faulkner is thinking of one of them here, it is most likely the man Sartoris shot as a robber in both Flags in the Dust (1929) and "An Odor of Verbena," the last story in The Unvanquished (1938).

In The Reivers this is the "Yankee general" whom the party of Confederate cavalrymen that included Theophilius McCaslin "almost captured" when they rode "at a gallop into the lobby" of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis (94). Both he and the event may be apocryphal, though to the Priest family, Lucius says, it is all "historical fact" (94). (See Unnamed Union Officers elsewhere in this index.)

In The Reivers the "fat iron-gray woman in pince-nez" who opens the door at the Parsham doctor's house might be his sister, but since he mentions his marriage a few pages later it seems more likely that she is his wife (185).

The man whom Lucius refers to in The Reivers as the "first Wylie" seems to have played a major role in shaping Yoknapatawpha County (71). When he set up his store at a crossing over the Tallahatchie River, the Indians still lived in the area. Because his place was "the head of navigation" - the furthest "small steamboats" could travel upriver from the Mississippi - the "whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy" that Yoknapatawpha imported from Vicksburg and the "cotton and furs" that it shipped out to the world were loaded or unloaded at his place (72).

In The Reivers "Mack Winbush's" is where one can buy the moonshine whiskey that Cal Bookwright makes (12), but the text does not say if Winbush's is a farm or juke joint or something else.

The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190).

The "folks" whom Vera is visiting in The Reivers are presumably her parents (99).

In The Reivers Son Thomas is "the youngest driver" who works at Maury Priest's livery stable (4). The "Son" in his name is not connected to any specific parents.

At the end of The Reivers Lucius notes that "Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the [school] work" he missed while having his adventure in Tennessee (296). She is obviously his teacher - and a very understanding one too.

In The Reivers John Powell is "the head hostler" at the Priest livery stable (4). A hostler is someone who looks after horses. On his twenty-first birthday, as "ineffaceable proof that he was . . . a man" (6), he bought a pistol that he carries to work in his overalls. Having the gun in the stable is against the rules, but he and Maury Priest handle this "moral problem" (6) by ignoring the its existence, "as mutual gentlemen must and should" (8). The novel does not discuss how Powell's race - he is black - might figure in the way he defines 'manhood' or defies the rules.

Mr. Powell is John Powell's father in The Reivers. John works for him "on the farm" to earn the money with which he buys "a .41 caliber snub-nosed revolver" from him (6).

As Ned puts it in The Reivers, the Parsham constable, Mr. Poleymus, "may be little, and he may be old; but he's a man, mon" (251). Ned admires the way he takes care of his wife, who has had a stroke, washing and feeding her. He also sorts out the various characters and their doings with a clear sense of humanity and justice.

In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree.

Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).