Character Keys

Displaying 101 - 200 of 3748

Add a new Character Key

Codesort descending title biography
102 Jim Bond

In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).

103 Ellen Coldfield Sutpen

This character is barely mentioned as "Mrs. Sutpen," Thomas' only wife, in "Wash," but as Ellen Coldfield Sutpen, his second wife in Absalom!, she presents a different image of the plantation mistress than someone like Rosa Millard, who presides over the Sartoris plantation in The Unvanquished. In Absalom! Ellen is the daughter of a merchant. She is described as "small-boned" but also "what is known as fullbodied" (51). According to the storytellers, Sutpen marries her to gain respectability.

104 Goodhue Coldfield

In Absalom!, the man who is Rosa Coldfield's "papa" and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .

105 Wash Jones

The title character of "Wash" can hardly be called its hero, but his story there and again in Absalom! acquires great moral force before it ends in blood and fire. Described in the novel as a "gaunt gangling man malaria-ridden with pale eyes and a face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty" (69), he survives as a "hanger-on of Sutpen," the richest planter in Yoknapatawpha (308).

106 Wash Jones' Daughter|Melicent

The "daughter" of Wash Jones and the mother of Milly is not named either in the short story "Wash," were she is first mentioned (536), or in Absalom!, where she plays a somewhat more visible role, but she has her own entry as "MELICENT JONES" in the "Genealogy" at the end of the novel (308). In the novel itself, she lives with her father for some years in the "abandoned" fishing camp at Sutpen's (99). The daughter she gives birth to there is "fatherless" (139).

107 Milly Jones

Milly Jones appears in both "Wash" and Absalom! as the poor white and illegitimate grandaughter of Wash, who is described in the novel's "Genealogy" as a "hanger-on of Sutpen" (308). She is "eight-years-old" when first mentioned in the short story, and an "infant" when first mentioned in the novel (536, 99). In both texts she is "a fifteen-year-old gal," as Wash puts it in the story, when Sutpen begins a kind of courtship of her, and "already mature [i.e. sexually], after the early way of her kind" (541).

108 Milly Jones' Daughter

In both "Wash" and again in Absalom!, this girl was born on an unspecified Sunday in 1869, denied by her father and murdered by her great-grandfather on the same day.

109 Mrs. Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon

The "inescapably negro" woman whom Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon marries in Absalom! (168) is apparently somewhat mentally deficient; at least, "her mentality" is mentioned disparagingly (167), and she is described as "existing" in an "automaton-like state" (166). The phrase "inescapably negro" is attributed to Judith; the phrases that Mr. Compson uses to describe her include "coal black and ape-like" (166); "resembling something in a zoo" (169), and "the black gargoyle" (170).

110 Issetibbeha

Issetibbeha is a chief of the tribe of Indians who are living in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers arrive. The Indians are called Choctaws in Faulkner's earlier fictions, and Chickasaws, the more historically appropriate name, in the later ones. Issetibbeha is identified as the son of Doom (AKA Ikkemotubbe) in the earliest 'Indian story," "Red Leaves," but later becomes Ikkemotubbe's uncle - although at one point in Go Down, Moses he is identified as "Ikkemotubbe's father old Issetibbeha" (245). He is consistently identified as the father of Moketubbe.

111 Mohataha

In the first five texts that mention this character, she is referred to as either "The Man's|Issetibbeha's sister" or "Ikkemotubbe's|Doom's mother." She is a member of the family of chiefs in the tribe of Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers began arriving, but Faulkner defines the tribe (variously called Choctaw or Chickasaw) as patriarchal, and so as a woman neither she nor her son is in the direct line of succession.

112 Ikkemotubbe

The Choctaw|Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe appears in fourteen texts, more than any of the other Indian characters in the fictions. His significance in most of them is either as Sam Fathers' father or as the chief who sold or traded Indian land to white settlers like Compson and Sutpen, but his own story is a fascinating one. It is first told - in two pages!

113 Moketubbe

In five texts Moketubbe is the son of Issetibbeha, and so, according to Faulkner's representation of Indian society, the heir to the title of 'The Man,' or chief of the tribe that lives in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving. The only one that shows him as the chief is "Red Leaves," Faulkner's first 'Indian story,' which begins after the death of his father.

114 Sam Fathers

This is not the Indian named "Had-Two-Fathers" who plays a minor role in "Red Leaves." This is the character best known as Sam Fathers, though as he tells Quentin Compson in Faulkner's second Indian story, "A Justice," his Indian name was "Had-Two-Fathers" too (345). In that story he is the child of a Choctaw named Crawfish-ford and an enslaved woman whom Doom, the chief, won gambling on a Mississippi riverboat.

115 Unnamed Siblings of Doom

In "Red Leaves" Doom is described as "one of three children" (317), but the narrative does not say if his siblings are male or female.

116 Unnamed Cousins of Issetibbeha

At the head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish between the two generations in any way (319).

117 Unnamed Uncles of Issetibbeha

The head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish the generation of "uncles" from the generation of "cousins" (319).

118 Unnamed Maternal Uncle of Issetibbeha

In "Red Leaves" the "son and brother" of the well-to-do family of Issetibbeha's mother presumably also has some "Negro blood," as she does (321). But his behavior links him to the upper class: after Doom gets his sister pregnant, he seeks him out "with a pistol" (318) to avenge the family's honor. Years later, however, as the "maternal uncle" of the child she bears, this brother "conducts" Doom on a trip abroad, to Paris and elsewhere in Europe (320).

119 Unnamed Mother of Issetibbeha

The "young woman" in "Red Leaves" whom Doom seduces in New Orleans is first described as the "daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family" (318). She is mainly white, but when her son Issetibbeha remembers her a few pages later, the narrative explicitly refers to "her Negro blood" (321). Given the casualness of the later reference, Faulkner might have expected his readers to read the designation "West Indian" as code for racial mixing in the first description, though that's by no means certain.

120 Unnamed Newest Wife of Issetibbeha

The Indians in "Red Leaves" - or at least the tribal chief, the Man - practice polygamy, as is clear from the reference to "Issetibbeha dying among his wives" (329). This is Issetibbeha's "newest wife" (321), not Moketubbe's mother but the woman who tells him Moketubbe has hidden the red slippers that he has always coveted. She is unwilling to sleep in the gilt bed that Issetibbeha brought back from Paris, but no other details about her are provided.

121 Unnamed Mother of Moketubbe

In "Red Leaves," "Moketubbe's mother" is introduced as a "comely girl" (320) whom Issetibbeha marries after seeing her at work in a melon patch. She is described as having "broad, solid thighs," a "sound back" and a "serene face" (321). Her race is not specified. Our identification of her as "Black" and "Enslaved" (rather than "Indian" and "Tribal Member") is based on her clothing (a "shift") and the fact that she is engaged in field labor, along with the way seeing her reminds Issetibbeha of his "own mother," with "her Negro blood" (321). But this is an interpretive choice.

122 Sometimes-Wakeup

Sometimes-Wakeup is one of Doom's two uncles in "A Justice," the brother of the Man prior to Doom, and he lives "by himself in a cabin by the creek" (349). He is apparently a recluse, whom the People only see when they take him food. After Doom murders the Man and the Man's son, Sometimes-Wakeup is next in the order of succession, though he declines to accept the position.

123 Unnamed Enslaved Grandmother|Mother of Sam Fathers

The woman who is the mother of Sam Fathers appears in four texts, though never as exactly the same person; her character changes as Faulkner's idea of the character Sam Fathers changes. In "A Justice," Sam is the son a slave whom Doom wins on a steamboat; she is married to another slave, but forced into a sexual relationship with one of the Indians, Crawford, who is the biological father of Sam.

126 Unnamed Son of Moketubbe

The unnamed son of Moketubbe is identified as an "eight-year-old" in "The Old People" and in Go Down, Moses (202, 158) and as "Moketubbe's little son" in "A Courtship" (363). He should have grown up to succeed his father as the chief of the tribe. However, in all three texts he dies within the same sentence in which he is first mentioned and within a few days after Ikkemotubbe, his father's cousin, returns to the tribe from New Orleans with a white powder that kills at least a puppy - and probably, though none of the texts say so explicitly, this child.

127 Unnamed Granddaughter of Issetibbeha|Mohataha

This is one of the several Faulkner characters whose inconsistencies cannot be reconciled. In the short story "A Name for the City," it is this unnamed granddaughter of Issetibbeha who marries a white man, Doctor Habersham's son; together the couple "emigrated to Oklahoma" in "the thirties" (i.e. the 1830s) along with the rest of the Chickasaws (202).

128 Unnamed Grandchildren of Mohataha

In Requiem for a Nun an unspecified group of Indians, identified only as "old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren," charge candy to Ratcliffe's trading post (28-29).

129 Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin

Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin - often referred to as "Old Carothers" - was one of Yoknapatawpha's earliest and wealthiest white settlers, the slave-owning patriarch of the racially diverse family that Faulkner puts at the center of two novels: Go Down, Moses and The Reivers. In two other texts - The Unvanquished and Intruder in the Dust he is a minor presence.

130 Mrs. Carothers McCaslin

The wife of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the slave-owning patriarch at the head of the McCaslin, Beauchamp, Edmonds and Priest families in Faulkner's late fictions, is mentioned only once, in The Reivers. It is her Bible that Ned, the only one of her husband's illegitimate and biracial descendants who is named McCaslin rather than Beauchamp, carries in his bag - a symbolic gesture that is extremely interesting and opaque.

131 Eunice 2

Eunice appears in the novel only as a name in the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but behind those entries is the terrible story that much of Go Down, Moses is organized around. Eunice was bought by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in New Orleans in 1807 for $650. Although she is never physically described, our decision to identify her race as 'Mixed' rather than 'Black' is based on the extravagant amount of money Old Carothers paid for her on the New Orleans slave market, which is associated elsewhere in Faulkner with the sale of quadroons as concubines to wealthy white men.

132 Tomasina

In Go Down, Moses, Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledgers as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child.

133 Theophilus McCaslin 1

Theophilus McCaslin - better know as "Uncle Buck" - is a son of Old Carothers McCaslin, the twin brother of Buddy, and the father of Ike. While Buddy appears in only two texts, Buck is present or mentioned in ten of them. He is actually called "Theophilus" when he attends the burial of Charles Bon in Absalom! and sends him off as a "Confedrit soldier" (122); the passage contains no hint of the larger McCaslin family or this man's place in it.

134 Amodeus (Buddy) McCaslin

Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) McCaslin is the son of Old Carothers McCaslin and the twin brother of Theophilus (Uncle Buck). He is an outstanding poker player, a good cook and housekeeper, and a less significant presence in the fiction that his brother. During the Civil War present of The Unvanquished Buddy is in Virginia fighting in Tennant's brigade after beating his brother in a card game for the privilege of serving in the Confederate regiment that was raised in Yoknapatawpha.

135 Carothers McCaslin's Daughter

Old Carothers McCaslin has three legitimate white children, one of whom is this daughter. This elusive figure is never named; the first time she appears in Go Down, Moses she is referred to as Cass Edmonds' "grandmother" (who "raised him following his mother's death") and "Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's sister" (9). She is at the head of the "distaff" side of the white McCaslins (5), "the woman" through whom Cass inherits both McCaslin blood, and, since Ike renounces his inheritance, the McCaslin property (243).

137 Sophonsiba Beauchamp McCaslin

Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their plantation be called "Warwick," as a claim on the family's purported connection to English royalty. The onstage role she plays in Go Down, Moses tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12).

138 Tomey's Turl

In Go Down, Moses Tomey's Turl is both the son and the grandson of the white man, Old Carothers McCaslin, who owned his grandmother and mother. The name by which he is known, Tomey’s Turl, instead of simply Terrel, underscores his ties to his mother, Tomey, but Hubert Beauchamp puts in words the paternal identity that makes white men nervous around Tomey's Turl: he is "that damn white half-McCaslin" (7). And actually, as Ike discovers in the plantation ledgers, he is 'three-quarters' McCaslin, though his incestuous origin is not ever mentioned explicitly.

139 Tennie Beauchamp

Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin.

140 Isaac McCaslin

Few characters in the Yoknapatawpha canon are as protean as Isaac (Uncle Ike) McCaslin. If you only read "A Bear Hunt" (1934), "Lion" (1935), "The Old People" (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948) and "Race at Morning" (1955), Uncle Ike is one of the men who are part of the annual hunting parties into the big woods.

141 Edmonds

The Edmonds family descends from Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin "by the distaff" - that is, from McCaslin's daughter rather than one of his sons (5). The first Edmonds in this line may have been the man who married that daughter, or could just as easily be the man who married the daughter of that daughter - the novel provides no information about the sequence, nor any information at all about this man.

142 Mrs. Edmonds

The "Mrs. Edmonds" who is Cass Edmonds' mother in Go Down, Moses may be Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin's granddaughter, or she may be the wife of McCaslin's grandson - depending on whether her mother or she herself married a man named Edmonds. The novel doesn't allow us to decide between these alternatives. All it says about this character is that she died, presumably when her son was very young: his grandmother, McCaslin's daughter, "raised him following his mother's death" (9).

143 Mrs. Isaac McCaslin

Isaac McCaslin's "dead wife" is very briefly referred to in "Delta Autumn." Go Down, Moses evokes her from the start, by identifying Ike as a "widower" twice on its first page (5). His wife - who may be the daughter of the bank president who hires Ike and his partner to put a new roof on his stable - remains in the background for most of the novel, but in her brief appearances Faulkner emphasizes her hostility, as Ike meets her "tense bitter indomitable voice" with a posture of familiarity (104).

144 Amodeus McCaslin Beauchamp

Amodeus McCaslin Beauchamp is the first child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. Named after the white son of Old Carothers McCaslin, the father and grandfather of Tomey's Turl, he dies as an infant.

145 Callina Beauchamp

In Go Down, Moses, Callina, or Carolina, Beauchamp is the daughter of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She dies as an infant.

146 Child of Tomey's Turl and Tennie Beauchamp

In Go Down, Moses this child is the third of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, and also the third to die in infancy.

147 Tennie's Jim|James Beauchamp

Although always a minor character, this black man reveals a lot about how Faulkner's imagination led him into and out of the haunted issue of slavery and its legacy. In his first published appearance he is "Tennie's Jim" in the hunting story "The Bear"; in that character he's a revised version of "Jimbo," one of the servants Major de Spain takes with him in "The Old People" on his annual hunting trips into the big woods.

148 Sophonsiba Beauchamp

In Go Down, Moses Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She is named Sophonsiba after white mistress of the plantation where Tennie was enslaved. In 1886, at the age of seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike McCaslin finds her and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments. Although Ike attempts to remove her from the squalor of her new life in Arkansas, her priorities are evident in the two words she offers in return: "I'm free" (267).

149 Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp

Lucas Beauchamp appears in seven fictions, all written after 1940. In Faulkner's last published novel, The Reivers, he is only mentioned, but the brief description of him there that one white character gives another sums him up well: "except for color," Lucas "looked (and behaved: just as arrogant, just as iron-headed, just as intolerant) exactly like" Lucius the first, the patriarch of the McCaslin family who is both Lucas' grandfather and his great-grandfather (223), and whom Lucas himself claims as his birthright.

150 Unnamed Husband of Fonsiba

The man who marries Fonsiba in Go Down, Moses looks and talks "like a white man," though he is a Negro "from the North," where he has lived "since a child" (261). He owns a farm in Arkansas, which he inherited from his father, who acquired it in return for his "military service" during the Civil War in what McCaslin calls "the Yankee army" but which Fonsiba's future husband corrects to "the United States army" (261).

151 Molly Worsham Beauchamp

The wife of Lucas Beauchamp figures in five different texts. In the first two ("A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always") she is unnamed. In the first one she speaks a thick, essentially mistrelish dialect ("Yawl and your Gawge Wilkins!" 223), in the second she is only mentioned, once.

152 Carothers McCaslin Edmonds

McCaslin Edmonds (also called "Cass") is the great-grandson of "Old Carothers" McCaslin, the slave-owner who built the large plantation in northeast Yoknapatawpha. Cass is descended from Old Carothers by the "distaff" (5) or female side of the family (his grandmother was Carothers McCaslin's daughter), and would not ordinarily inherit the McCaslin property. But when Ike McCaslin renounces that inheritance, his cousin Cass comes into possession of it, and in turn he bequeaths it to his son, Zachary Edmonds.

153 Sarah Edmonds Priest

Lucius' paternal Grandmother in The Reivers is an Edmonds by birth, which accounts for the fact that the Priests belong to the "cadet branch" of the McCaslin-Edmonds family (17). Married at fifteen, she is now "just past fifty" (41). While afraid at first of the family's new car, she soon learns to enjoy riding in it - until the first (and last) time the wind blows her husband's expectorated tobacco juice into her face.

154 Alice Edmonds

Alice is the wife of McCaslin (Cass) Edmonds and the mother of Zack Edmonds. She is mentioned only once in Go Down, Moses: "[Cass'] wife Alice had taught Fonsiba to read and write too a little" (263). (However, in the earlier chapter titled "The Fire and the Hearth," the narrative claims that it was Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, who taught the Beauchamp children to read, 106.)

155 Lucius Quintus Priest I

In The Reivers, his last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).

156 Unnamed Son of James Beauchamp's Son

The young woman who has an affair and a child with Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses tells Ike that her father died while his family lived in Indianapolis. No mention is made of her mother. One of her "folks" is a child of James Beauchamp, and so descended from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, but we cannot say definitively that it was her father rather than her mother (343). (In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," the young woman and her family are not connected to the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, so her father in that story has his own entry in the database.)

157 Henry Beauchamp

Henry Beauchamp is the oldest child of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses. He is raised alongside Roth Edmonds as the white child's "black foster-brother" (106), just as his father was raised alongside Roth’s father, Zack. When Roth, however, insists on drawing the color line between them, the seven-year-old Henry accepts the new terms of their relationship, but tells Roth, "peacefully," that "I aint shamed of nobody . . . Not even me" (110).

158 Emily Grierson

Miss Emily, as the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" explains, is “a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (119). In other words, she is a recluse and a source of fascination for the townspeople of Jefferson, who keep a constant eye on her doings. She never married, and her domineering father kept potential suitors away from her, but after his death she had a potentially scandalous relationship with a single suitor, a Yankee stranger named Homer Barron.

159 Nat Beauchamp Wilkins

Lucas and Molly's daughter Nat is described in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses as "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She struggles against her domineering father and with her lazy husband, determined to get what she deserves. Despite her shrewdness as a bargainer, she can't ultimately overcome her circumstances.

160 George Wilkins

Like Lucas Beauchamp, George Wilkins is a tenant farmer on the Edmonds plantation who is at times Lucas' rival and at others his assistant; he is also Lucas' son-in-law, though the time at which that happens is hard to pin down. He appears first in "A Point of Law," as competition for Lucas' moonshine business; Lucas' attempt to foil him lands them both in essentially comic trouble with the law. Their get-out-of-jail card is the (possibly forged) certificate of marriage between him and Lucas' daughter Nat.

161 Zachary Edmonds

Zachary Edmonds is the son of Cass and Alice, the father of Roth, and the great-great-grandson (on the "distaff" side) of the patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, from whom the Edmondses inherit the big plantation which Zack runs during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Go Down, Moses stories he is characterized mainly through his relationship to the Negro tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp - who is also his cousin. Like Bayard Sartoris and Ringo, the white and black boys grow up together, living "almost as brothers lived" (54).

162 Maury Priest I

Like William Faulkner's father Murry in real life, Lucius' father Maury Priest owns a livery stable. In the first chapter of The Reivers, Maury displays considerable force of character when he handles the trouble caused by Boon's rash anger. And the "gentlemanly" way he treats even his black employees is worth noting (8). But after that he becomes almost invisible, even before departing with the rest of the adults in the family for Bay St. Louis.

163 Unnamed Granddaughter of James Beauchamp

The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child in Go Down, Moses is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" makes Ike realize that she is a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North.

164 Samuel Worsham Beauchamp

In "Go Down, Moses," and again in the chapter with that title in the novel Go Down, Moses - the only texts he appears in - Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (256, 351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

165 Carothers Roth Edmonds

The great-great-great-grandson of Carothers McCaslin, the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin after whom he is named, Carothers (Roth) Edmonds is the last owner of the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation in the fictions, the white landlord of the Negro tenant farmers who work the fields that he owns. Among those tenants is his 'black' relative, Lucas Beauchamp, the grandson of Old Carothers. In Go Down, Moses and the stories the precede it - "A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always" - the relationship between Roth and Lucas is mainly an occasion for comedy.

166 Louisa Edmonds

In Go Down, Moses Zack Edmonds' unnamed wife dies giving birth to their son Roth; that would be around 1898. In The Reivers "Cousin Louisa" is the woman at the McCaslin-Edmonds place who takes care of Lucius' siblings when his parents go to Bay St. Louis (48). Although that happens in 1905, Louisa is probably Zack's wife, though Faulkner may have instead decided to give Zack a sister named Louisa.

167 Alison Lessep Priest

The most vivid detail that Lucius Priest, the narrator of The Reivers, provides about his mother, Alison, is her love for riding in her father-in-law's automobile: she sits in the back seat with her children, her "face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's" (41). She is resourceful enough to "invent a kind of shield" to keep them all safe whenever Grandfather discharges the tobacco he chews (41).

168 Lucius Priest II

Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.

169 Lessep Priest

The oldest of Lucius Priest's younger brothers in The Reivers is named Lessep, his mother's maiden name. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than seven years old (56).

170 Maury Priest II

The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).

171 Alexander Priest

In The Reivers Alexander is the youngest of Lucius Priest's three brothers, and still in diapers. His birth just before or during "last winter" is mentioned in the text (44).

172 Roth Edmonds' Child

The end of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family line in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making their child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter.

173 Lucius Priest II's Son

The narrator of The Reivers, Lucius Priest, at one point mentions "your father" to his grandson, the person to whom he is telling the story (25). From that one reference we can't say definitively if this "father" is the narrator's son - or son-in-law. But if we assume that his grandson bears both Lucius' names (i.e. is a Priest), then it follows that he is a son. The reference to this "father" occurs in connection with the period of "the mid-thirties" in Jefferson (25).

174 Lucius Priest III

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.

176 Unnamed Mother of Ned McCaslin

In The Reivers, the unnamed mother of Ned McCaslin is "the natural [i.e. illegitimate] daughter" of Lucius McCaslin and one of his female slaves (31). In Go Down, Moses the slave with whom McCaslin has a daughter is named Eunice, and their daughter is Tomasina; from her descends the Beauchamp side of the McCaslin family. These Beauchamps are a major part of the earlier novel's story, and some of them re-appear in The Reivers.

177 Ned McCaslin

Introduced into The Reivers 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. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, 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).

178 Bobo Beauchamp

In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning).

179 Flem Snopes' Grandmother

In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.

180 Flem Snopes' Grandfather

In The Town Flem tells a furniture store owner in Memphis that he had a grandfather, "because everybody had," adding that he never knew his, but "whoever he was he never owned enough furniture for a room" (233). In The Mansion Mink tells the warden of the penitentiary that his and Flem's "grandpaw had two sets of chillen" (114). Those are the only references in the canon to this ur-Snopes, but from them we can infer that he was poor and married twice. From the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group we know that he and his wives had a lot of children.

181 Ab Snopes

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.

182 Vynie Snopes

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished the woman who opens the door of Ab Snopes' cabin to Bayard and Ringo is presumably his wife - at least, our database makes that presumption. She tries to throw them off the track by telling them that "Mr. Snopes" has gone to Alabama (101, 162). In The Hamlet Ab has two wives. This first one is named Vynie.

183 Lennie Snopes

Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).

184 Flem Snopes

In the beginning was Flem Snopes. He is the very first character who appears in the very first fiction about Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner sat down to write. He is the "Father Abraham" in the title of that unfinished text, which was going to tell the story of Flem's rise from tenant farmer's son in Frenchman's Bend to bank president in Jefferson, from a sharecropper's cabin to The Mansion - as the final volume of the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner finished over three decades later is titled.

185 Net Snopes

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt.

186 Snopes, Twin Sister of Net

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure.

187 Colonel Sartoris Snopes

Ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes is the focal character in "Barn Burning." The youngest of sharecropper Abner Snopes' four children, he is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud" (4).

188 Mink Snopes

One of Flem's closest relations - on the tangled Snopes family tree they share a common grandmother - Mink is described in The Mansion as a "small frail creature, not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy" (55). Inside that body, however, he carries around enough rage to claim two men's lives. He first appears in The Hamlet when Faulkner decides to adapt his earlier short story "The Hound" into the saga of the Snopeses.

189 Isaac Snopes

Appearing only in The Hamlet, Isaac "Ike" Snopes is the cognitively limited cousin of Flem and Mink. At 14, he is a "hulking figure" in "bursting overalls" (94) who works around Mrs. Littlejohn's hotel as a kind of janitor. Ike is referred to as an "idiot" and "creature" with a "mowing and bobbing head" and a "Gorgon-face" that "had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair" (95). Officially, Flem is Ike's guardian, but he does nothing to protect Ike from being exploited by Lump Snopes.

190 Eula Varner Snopes

Eula is mentioned in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel (1929) and two short stories from the 1930s. She's simply Flem's "wife" in Flags in the Dust (166). The stories, however, introduce the character trait that will dominate her portrayal in the Snopes trilogy: her sexual attractiveness. As the youngest daughter of Will and Maggie Varner in "Spotted Horses" she's a "big, soft-looking" girl whom suitors swarm around "like bees around a honey pot" (166).

191 Will Varner

Will Varner appears or is mentioned in ten different texts, as "Uncle Billy" in the first two and as "Will" in all but one of the others (in "Centaur in Brass" he is the unnamed father of Flem Snopes' wife). In those first two - As I Lay Dying and "Spotted Horses" - he is a farmer and veterinarian who (in the absence of a real doctor) sets the broken legs of two different human critters. But in the other texts he makes a much more commanding figure as "the principal landowner" in Frenchman's Bend, to quote from his third text, "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (136).

192 Maggie Varner

Mrs. Will Varner, Maggie Varner in The Hamlet, figures in four of the fictions (compared to her husband's ten). She is mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the unnamed wife of "Uncle Billy," as Will is called there, specifically in connection with the birth of her first child, Jody. The next time she is appears, in The Hamlet, she is the mother of sixteen children, eleven of whom still live, though only two of them are important in the novel: Jody and his sister Eula.

193 Hoake|Hoke McCarron

Whether as Hoake (as his name is spelled in The Hamlet) or Hoke (as it's spelled in The Town and The Mansion), McCarron plays a biologically crucial role in the Snopes trilogy as the father of Linda Snopes, daughter of Eula and, ostensibly, Flem. His character is not attractive - except to Eula - in the first novel. He is an outsider to Yoknapatawpha, the son of substantial property owners, "a little swaggering and definitely spoiled though not vain so much as intolerant" (150).

194 Linda Snopes Kohl

Linda's character comes into focus slowly but steadily across three decades and six fictions. In the first of those, Flags in the Dust, as Flem Snopes' "baby" she is not named nor even gendered. In the next, she still has no name or gender but Suratt, the narrator of "Spotted Horses," sees her clearly enough to call her "as well-growed a three-months-old baby as we ever see" (167) - implicitly suggesting she was conceived out of wedlock, and that Flem might not be her father.

195 Yettie Snopes

Mink Snopes' wife - given a first name, Yettie, in The Mansion, the second and last fiction in which she appears - plays a small part in the large saga of the Yoknapatawpha Snopeses, but has a very powerful backstory, as it's described in The Hamlet. Mink met during his travels, when after seeing her "standing in the savage lamp-light . . . in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp" (243-44), he called a halt to his travels and took a job at the camp. Her mother died in giving birth to her.

196 Mink Snopes' Daughter 1

In The Hamlet Mink and his wife have two "towheaded" daughters (81), born two years apart (264). This is the older one, though the novel does not distinguish between them when it depicts them, for example, hiding behind their mother's "skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world" (82). They were conceived two years apart, in the first five years of their parents' marriage (264). In The Mansion, the "two daughters" are mentioned, briefly; this older one disappears after her father goes to prison and her mother dies (10).

197 Mink Snopes' Daughter 2

This is the younger of Mink and Yetti's two "towheaded" daughters who are briefly mentioned in The Hamlet (81) and The Mansion. They are two years apart in age, but the first novel does not distinguish between them. The second does: unlike the older sister, this "younger daughter" becomes "the madam" of a Memphis whorehouse (320) - though that detail is mentioned only when the narrative notes that Mink unknowingly walks past the place on his way to buy a pistol.

198 Mink Snopes' Father

The brief description of Mink's father in The Hamlet could make him seem sympathetic: he's a lifelong sharecropper who "moved from farm to farm, without himself having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them" (261).

199 Mink Snopes' Mother

In The Mansion Mink Snopes's mother died before he got to know her - or even what she called him.

200 Sartoris Womenfolks

Other than Colonel John, the only Sartorises referred to in Absalom! are "Sartoris' womenfolks," who use their "silk dresses" to sew the regimental flag that Yoknapatawpha's Confederate volunteers carry to the Civil War (63).

201 Colonel John Sartoris' Father

In "There Was a Queen," Elnora refers to Miss Jenny's "paw" as having been killed by the Yankees during the Civil War (732). She doesn't say any more about him, and he is not even mentioned in any other texts, but the larger story of the Sartoris family as Faulkner tells it elsewhere, especially in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished, suggests that this man owned a slave plantation in one of the Carolinas - and that the family's "Cal-lina house" was a mansion before the Yankees burned it down (732).

202 Belle Mitchell Benbow

In Flags in the Dust Belle is Harry Mitchell's wife and Horace Benbow's lover for most of the novel, though she is Mrs. Benbow at the end. With Harry she has a daughter, Little Belle. Her hair is described as a "rich bloody auburn" (199), and her personality in equally vivid if pejorative terms: "her eyes are like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent" (182). "Smoldering" is recurrent adjective for her (201, 203, etc.). Unlike the aristocratic Benbows, she is very much a citizen of the New South.

203 Mrs. Buddy McCallum

Buddy McCallum's dead wife in "The Tall Men" - the mother of the twins Lucius and Anse - is only mentioned briefly, in connection with her absence from the McCallum family graveyard where the story ends. Like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, she "wanted to be buried with her folks" (60). According to Gombault, "she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

204 Theophilus McCaslin 2

In the short story "Lion" Theophilus McCaslin is the grandson of Uncle Ike McCaslin, and a member of the hunting party. (This character never appears in any other story, but later Faulkner uses the name "Theophilus McCaslin" for Ike's father. Those later texts also say that Ike never has any children.)

205 Samuel Beauchamp's Mother

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that name in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's unnamed mother was the oldest daughter of Lucas and Mollie Beauchamp; she dies while giving birth to him. In "A Point of Law," Lucas and Molly Beauchamp have at least one child besides Nat; we are assuming this child is the daughter who gives birth to Samuel, though the story's only reference to her is ambiguous. According to the narrator, it is known that Lucas has "one daughter with grandchildren" (214).

Pages