Character Keys

This conductor of a train to Oxford in Sanctuary is fooled by two college students who are riding without tickets.

InThe Reivers the conductor of the train that carries Boon, Lucius and Ned to Parsham is fully aware of the stolen horse that they're hiding in a box car.

The conductor on the train carrying Byron Snopes's children in The Town gets off so quickly when it arrives in Jefferson that it seems something is amiss.

In Requiem for a Nun, the ceremony at the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900 includes the firing of a salute and a somewhat diminished version of the famed 'rebel yell' performed by the town's surviving veterans of the Civil War, "old men in the gray and braided coats" of officers - since they have apparently promoted themselves over the passing years (188).

The Confederate veterans in Absalom! are brought into existence by Shreve, who is a Canadian who has never been to the South. He imagines the "veterans in the neat brushed hand-ironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with," decked out for a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262).

In "Knight's Gambit" there are two different but essentially interchangeable groups of workers who turn the old plantation that Harriss inherits into a conspicuously modern and lavish show place. The text even uses the same word to describe both groups: gangs. First on the scene are the "gangs of strange men with enough machinery to have built a high-way or a reservoir" who build the stables, paddock, and polo field (161).

This is the older of the two Negroes who work in Rogers' restaurant in Flags in the Dust. The narrative does not explicitly call him the cook, but since it describes the cooking that is going on and identifies the "younger of the two," Houston, as the waiter, it seems safe to assume this older Negro is the cook.

In The Mansion Houston hires this woman "to cook" for him after his wife is killed (11), so presumably she is not the same cook as the one mentioned in The Hamlet, who cooks for Mr. and Mrs. Houston during the first two months of their marriage.

In The Town this cook lives and works in Manfred de Spain's "late father's big wooden house" (14).

In The Town, these Negroes are regular customers at Garraway's store on Seminary Hill. Gavin Stevens describes them as "loafing" (327), and he and Mr Garraway mutter so as "not to be overheard: two white men discussing in a store full of Negroes a white woman's adultery" (329).

In The Town this "delivery boy from Christian's drugstore" regularly brings "his ritual tray of four coca colas" for bank employees at the end of the business day (323). The novel does not specify his race, but typically in the Yoknapatawpha fictions delivery boys are black.

This character in The Town waits in the car at the Jefferson cemetery to drive Linda Snopes to Memphis.

In "Uncle Willy" two different groups of people patronize Willy's drugstore. They are sharply distinguished by race - and by the kinds of things they buy. This group is the "country people buying patent medicines" (226); they are white.

Among the several kinds of crowds described in Intruder in the Dust are the ones composed of 'country people.' That is, people "from the distant circumambient settlements and crossroads stores and isolate farms," who regularly come in to Jefferson to shop and do other kinds of business. The last chapter opens with Chick watching them from the window of his uncle's office: "people black and white" (231), "men and women and children too then and the old people and the babies and the young couples" (230).

In "Tomorrow" this clerk reads the county's indictment against Bookwright.

While the clerk himself does not appear in Flags in the Dust, his office does: on rainy days, the narrator says, the "city fathers," the old men who hold various patronage jobs in the town or county government, "move inside [the courthouse] to the circuit clerk's office" (161).

Although never named, the drug store clerk in "Uncle Willy" plays a large role in the plot. He arrives in Jefferson "about six months" before Reverend Schultz and Mrs. Merridew hire him to manage the drugstore while Willy undergoes drug treatment in Memphis (232). No one in Jefferson "knows anything about him," but he arrives in town with "letters to the church," which is apparently the basis on which he is hired (232). He completely transforms the store - making it attractive to the "town trade" that had previously shunned it (233).

In The Hamlet this "drummer" is a "youngish city man with city ways" who sees Eula when he finds himself in Frenchman's Bend "by accident" and tries to court her, one time wearing "the first white flannel trousers Frenchman's Bend ever saw" (147). The same pair of "ice cream pants" are "ruined" after the local suitors drive him away (147). According to the narrative, this man already has a "wife and family" (148), but that isn't why the young men of the Bend attack him.

In The Sound and the Fury this drummer appears at the hardware store where Jason works, and the two men discuss cotton. Jason invites him to go to the drugstore to get "a dope" (191). ( "Drummer" is an outdated term for a traveling salesman; "dope" is an outdated term for a Coca-Cola.) Because he thinks Jason believes him to be a Jew, he tells Jason that "my folks have some French blood" (191).

In Light in August this veteran of the First World War remarks that if he had it to do over again "he would fight this time on the German side" (450). When he adds that he would fight America too "if America's fool enough to help France out again" (450), he is attacked by Percy Grimm.

"The Bear" and Go Down, Moses contrast the hunters in the big woods to the "men myriad and nameless even" who "gnaw" and "swarm" and "hack" at the aboriginal forest in order to clear the trees for farming (281-82). Compared to the bear, these farmers and planters are "puny" and "like pygmies" (282).

"Five men in overalls squatted against the wall of Varner's store" (156) - this is how "The Hound" describes the group whose conversation about Houston's disappearance makes Cotton increasingly uncomfortable. Their discussion suggests all five live nearby. Their "overalls" and "squatting" posture suggest they are all farmers. But the narrative gives no other details to identify them as a group, and distinguishes them from each other only as "the first," "a second," "a third" and "a fourth" (156-57). Cotton's grudge against Houston is common knowledge among them.

After the Civil War slave labor on Yoknapatawpha's large plantations was often replaced by tenant labor. Two generations of sharecroppers are mentioned in Requiem for a Nun: the "men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico," and their "sons and daughters," who wear "the installment-plan garments" advertised in national magazines (192). According to the novel's exaggerated account, the first group, "an entire generation of farmers," has vanished (193).

In Sanctuary these firemen arrive at Popeye's mother's boarding house in Florida to discover his grandmother in the attic, "stamping out a fire of excelsior in the center of the floor" (305). The last time they arrive there, the house is engulfed in flames.

In Flags in the Dust Caspey invents a large number of German soldiers to conquer: "about thirty" sailors from a submarine (58) and "a whole regiment of Germans" swimming in a river (59). According to the highly fictionalized stories he tells at home, they were all killed by him and other black soldiers.

This "groom" delivers Chick's horse Highboy to the Mallison house in Intruder in the Dust (123). This is the kind of job that is often performed by blacks in Faulkner's fiction, but in this case there is no hint of an African American dialect in his voice.

In The Reivers Miss Reba claims she knows the man who owns the hotel in Parsham, who apparently lives in Memphis.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of hunters. This group consists of the the men with whom Ike McCaslin hunted in the past, when game was still plentiful in Yoknapatawpha. Ike can remember how they "shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skills and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs" (267, 319). Some of these men are the fathers and grandfathers of young men in the story's present-day hunting party.

There are four sets of hunters in "Lion": 1) the members of the hunting party who are not specifically named; 2) the narrator's generic hunters who "love" hunting dogs (184); 3) the "other people" - men from nearby but not necessarily among the annual hunting party featured in the story - who killed "deer and bear" on the land owned by Major de Spain, "on Major de Spain's courtesy" (186); and 4) the men from Jefferson who arrive at the hunt annually for the last day, the day set aside for "driving" Old Ben (189).

There are various groups of hunters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. These "hunters" are the essentially transcendent community created by the narrator at the start of the chapter called "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In this passage, "hunters" refers not to any specific characters but to an exalted meta-cultural and spiritual category of "men": they are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181).

The local man who built Yoknapatawpha's first automobile in his "back yard on the edge of town" appears in Faulkner's last four novels. That quotation is from Requiem for a Nun, where he is unnamed but described vividly as "a grease-covered man with the eyes of a visionary monk" (190). In the last two novels of the Snopes trilogy he is named Buffaloe. The Town identifies him as the "city electrician" and a "genius" who "in 1904 . . . drove out of his backyard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely" (12).

In The Unvanquished these girls in "white dresses and red sashes" celebrate the inaugural arrival of the John Sartoris' railroad (226).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, Bayard says that "all the ladies in Jefferson" (58) - in the second text this is revised to "all the women in Jefferson" (188) - travel out to the Sartoris plantation on several occasions: to confront Drusilla for her unlady-like behavior and to attend the wedding that will ceremonialize her return to their fold. The first time they appear, there are "fourteen of them," though that total includes Martha Habersham (63, 194). They all seem both curious and outraged by what they see.

When thinking about money in The Sound and the Fury, Jason is reminded of the local merchant, "a man right here in Jefferson [who] made a lot of money selling rotten goods to niggers" (194). This man hoards his money until he gets sick, when he "joins the church and buys himself a Chinese missionary" as a means to his own salvation (194).

During the Saturday evening that Lucius spends at Miss Reba's in The Reivers, he hears "the bass rumble" of the men who patronize the brothel, but they are not seen or described with any other details (130).

Mink Snopes' murder trial is described, at least briefly, in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Though the judge who presides over the trial is not named until the third volume - in The Mansion he is referred to, once, as "Judge Brummage" (48) - there's no reason not to assume that Faulkner imagined the same person on the bench in all three accounts.

Given the political realities of Mississippi circa 1930 it's safe to say that the jurors in Lee Goodwin's trial in Sanctuary are all white and male, but all the narrative ever says about them is that, after Temple's testimony brings the proceeding to an inexplicable end, they take "eight minutes" to convict him of a crime he did not commit (291).

The twelve jurors in "Monk" to whom Monk tries to make a speech are referred to only as "the jury" (42). Given both the cultural realities of Mississippi in the 1930s and the representation of other trials in Faulkner's fictions, one can assume this group was all-white and all-male.

This is the lawyer in The Town who defends Wilbur Provine on moonshining charges (177).

In Sanctuary the first Leavenworth lawyer whom Ruby hires to secure Lee's release from prison allows her to pay him with sex, but never tells her that he cannot do "anything for a federal prisoner" (277).

It's likely that in The Mansion "the mail carrier" (33) and "the mail rider" (140) who deliver the mail to Frenchman's Bend are the same unnamed person. As the "rider" he delivers a "special wrote-out private message" from Hoke McCarron to Eula Varner (140). As the "carrier," he also gives Mink a ride to Jefferson, until he kicks Mink off the wagon for accusing him of stealing his five-dollar bill (33).

When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he thinks how soon newspapers delivered by the "RFD carrier" report the news of the local young men who have been killed in the fighting (251). The federal "R[ural] F[ree] D[elivery]" system brought mail directly to Americans who lived in the countryside, away from post offices.

In The Town this mail rider delivers "a dollar's worth of furnish every Saturday morning" to Grover Cleveland Winbush's mother - that is, a dollar's worth of food staples (176). (Working for the Rural Free Delivery program, mail carriers distributed mail from central post offices in towns like Jefferson to the people who lived in the surrounding countryside.)

In "Uncle Willy" the marshal helps Uncle Willy's self-appointed guardians try to control him. In Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions the "marshal" is a peace officer whose jurisdiction is the town of Jefferson.

In Light in August "the night marshal" joins Percy Grimm's squad of peacekeepers (456). When he does not join their poker game, some of the veterans jokingly call him an "M.P." and give him the Bronx cheer they learned to make during the war (457).

The job of Jefferson's night marshal includes enforcing an informal curfew by trying to get people off the streets during the night, although according to The Mansion his threats to the men who remain in the barbershop or poolroom at "two oclock on Sunday mornings" sound too vague to be effective. "If you boys don't quiet down and go home" - apparently he never finishes that sentence (203).

These are the "white women" in the "houses in Memphis" that, as a young man in The Mansion, Mink discovers are available, "if he had the money" (317).

In "That Will Be Fine" Georgie's mother theorizes that "most other men were prejudiced against Uncle Rodney, why she didn't know" (267).

On his way to jail in The Mansion Mink imagines that Flem has sent a messenger to reach out to him and help him somehow.