Character Keys

In As I Lay Dying this man owned a drugstore in Jefferson and was also the "pre-1865 owner" of the enslaved man called "Uncle Pete" Gombault (191).

In As I Lay Dying, the marshal of Mottson argues with Anse to get him to move the stinking coffin out of town.

As the Bundrens enter Jefferson from the south in As I Lay Dying, they pass "negro cabins" along the road (229). As the wagon passes a group of "three negroes" walking on the road, they react with "that expression of shock and instinctive outrage" that has accompanied the Bundrens along their route (229). When one of the men in this group exclaims "Great God . . . what they got in that wagon?" Jewel is incensed (229).

When Vernon Tull arrives at the Bundren house the day after Addie’s death in As I Lay Dying, he finds "about a dozen wagons was already there" (85). These belong to the group of neighbors who attend Addie’s funeral. Before the service they divide themselves into female and male groups: the "womenfolks" wait inside the house while "the men stop on the porch, talking some, not looking at one another" or "sit and squat" a "little piece from the house" (87). When "the women begin to sing," the men move into the house (91).

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman imagines that he can jump from the porch to the barn "like the pink lady in the circus" (54) - an acrobat he has presumably seen at a show in town in the past.

This man, identified in As I Lay Dying only as "the white man" (229), nearly gets into a fight with Jewel after Jewel, mistakenly believing he was the person who commented on the smell of Addie’s coffin, swears and throws a wild punch. In response, the man pulls out "an open knife" - but Darl gets him to put it up after Jewel "takes back" what he said (230).

The father of the unnamed Negro who marries Fonsiba is only mentioned in passing in Go Down, Moses, but occupies a significant place in the Yoknapatawpha fiction as an African American who served in the Union army. There were in historical fact almost 180,000 'Colored troops' during the Civil War, serving in both non-combat and combat roles, but until recently these men were largely invisible in American representations of that war. This man is the only black "Yankee" soldier in Faulkner's work (261).

In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," this woman lives in Vicksburg with her family, and was willing to take in her niece after her father's death. When this niece tells Ike McCaslin that her aunt "took in washing," he suddenly realizes the racial nature of the "effluvium" her niece brings with her (278, 277). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, the women who wash clothes are always Negroes.

Just before the young woman enters the tent at the end of "Delta Autumn," Ike McCaslin sees, "sitting in the stern" of the boat that brought her to the camp, "a Negro man" (277). The boat is his, and he is the woman's "cousin," though unlike his, her race is not immediately apparent (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for Go Down, Moses, he made the young woman the granddaughter of James Beauchamp, and so made this cousin part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family. For that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.

In The Hamlet Cliff Odum helps Mrs. Snopes get the milk separator in Jefferson.

Intruder in the Dust includes a romantic vignette about the daughter of the man who was the county jailer in 1864. Struck by the appearance of a "ragged unshaven lieutenant" who is leading a defeated Confederate unit past the jail, this "young girl of that time" writes her name with a diamond in "one of the panes of the fanlight beside the door"; "six months later" they are married (49). (This story is told more fully, and shifted to the beginning of the Civil War, in Requiem for a Nun, 1951. There the daughter is named Cecelia Farmer.)

Although he is not specifically mentioned in The Reivers, the "jailor" in the county sheriff's office in Hardwick can be inferred from the number of times the cells are locked and unlocked while Boon is there (270). The "jailor's wife," on the other hand, is mentioned, though not named (270). (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," Intruder in the Dust, "An Error in Chemistry" and Requiem for a Nun but with an 'o' in "Monk" and The Reivers.

In the fantasies that Ratliff has in The Mansion about how Gavin could be freed from his obsession with Eula's daughter, he speculates that "maybe" Kohl could catch Linda "unawares" and be married to her by a "j.p." (J.P, short for Justice of the Peace, is usually capitalized.)

In The Mansion this is the policeman who drives Mink out of the train station in Memphis; he is "not in uniform," and much more aggressive than the policeman who drove Mink out of the park (318).

For most of Intruder in the Dust the town streets are thronged with people, mostly men, who anticipate the lynching as a kind of drama. It's not clear how many of the men in this mob are residents of Jefferson, rather than country people who've driven into town. At one point, however, the narrator describes the newer residents of Jefferson as a group. They are "prosperous young married couples" with "two children each" and "an automobile" and "memberships in the country club and the bridge clubs and the junior rotary" (118).

When Faulkner returned to the Compson story in the "Appendix" he wrote in 1946, he has Caddy marry again a decade after the collapse of her first marriage. All we know about the unnamed man she marries in Hollywood in 1920 is that he is a "minor movingpicture magnate"; she gets a divorce from him in Mexico in 1925 (332).

In Flags in the Dust "a negro lad" serves a car that pulls up to the curb outside the drugstore (274). Presumably he fetches something from the soda fountain inside the store, but that is not specified.

These are the men in Flags in the Dust who stay at the Beard Hotel; they come to Jefferson for various reasons: traveling salesmen, jurors from out of town, weather-stranded countrymen, even two "town young bloods" who keep a room as a place for gambling. Besides Byron Snopes, some - bachelors identified as "clerks, mechanics and such" - live there more permanently (104).

The first of the two Negroes who cook for Hightower in Light in August is a woman who is described as a "high brown" (72). She quits after Mrs. Hightower's suicide, when her presence as a woman in his house makes her and Reverend Hightower vulnerable to gossip and vigilante violence (72).

In Go Down, Moses a growing number of local men join the hunters at Major de Spain’s camp to see Lion hunt down Old Ben. The men have a stake in the hunt: they “had fed Old Ben corn and shoats and even calves for ten years” (224). They are described as “in their own hats and hunting coats and overalls which any town negro would have thrown away or burned and only the rubber boots strong and sound, and the worn and blueless guns and some even without guns” (224).

In Light in August a second "word-of-mouth messenger" brings news of Nathaniel Burden from Old Mexico to the Burdens living somewhere west of St. Louis in 1863. The messenger himself is "going east to Indianny for a spell" (245), so presumably that is where he is from.

In The Mansion, the first man inside the Baptist church every Sunday morning is "the Negro that fired the furnace" (63).

These are the six slaves won by Doom in "A Justice" during the steamboat trip back from New Orleans. Two of them, a wife and a husband, play major roles in the story and have their own character entries.

In "Red Leaves" these are the forty slaves who are sold by Issetibbeha to a Memphis trader. He uses the money to go to Europe.

In Light in August this good-natured man gives Lena Grove a ride from Varner's Store to Jefferson; on the outskirts of the town, they see the smoke from Joanna Burden's burning house.

This generic 'wagon driver' is mentioned in the summary description of the fifteen years Joe Christmas spends on "the street" (223) in Light in August. Joe's long strange trip is epitomized by all the rides that he begs on "country wagons" with the "driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask" (224).

In "The Old People" these Negroes live and work on the narrator's family farm, probably as tenant farmers. The cabins they live in may once have been part of the slave quarters. The racial and economic realities of Yoknapatawpha require them to put on the semblance of "servility," to have "recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth . . . to sustain [a buffer] between themselves and white men" on whom they depend for their subsistence (203).

In "Knight's Gambit" the Negroes who live along the railroad tracks in Jefferson are identified only by their "alien yet inviolably durable" homes, the "Negro cabins" Charles sees out the window of the train bringing him home (252-53).

Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "an old man in a shabby brown overcoat" sailing a toy boat beside the children (316).

In "Red Leaves" Louis Berry is one of the Indians who leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - a task which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. Louis is described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313).

The historical Madame de Pompadour who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" was the primary mistress of Louis XV, an 18th century King of France. Issetibbeha returns home from France with some furniture reputedly owned by Louis XV.

In "Red Leaves" the character named Had-Two-Fathers appears only once, briefly, as one of the men who tell Moketubbe he should take off the red slippers (336). He is not the character Faulkner created later, also named Had-Two-Fathers but better known as Sam Fathers; this later character will play important roles in seven of the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

In "Red Leaves" Three Basket is about sixty years old and, like Louis Berry, described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313). He wears "an enameled snuffbox" as an earring (313). Apparently he is a kind of overseer on the Indian plantation. Along with Louis Berry, he spends six days tracking down a Issetibbeha's servant, often remembering Doom's death, which was the last time a runaway slave had to be captured and killed.

In "Red Leaves" the tribe's women stay on the plantation with the old men and children rather than participate in the chase after the servant.

In "Red Leaves" these runners and couriers provide information to Moketubbe during the hunt for the servant.

In "Red Leaves" this group of Indians meets Doom's West Indian wife and accompanies her from the steamboat to his plantation.

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "dressing a fowl" while listening to the unnamed old man tell the stories of the olden days (323).

The funeral ceremonies for Issetibbeha in "Red Leaves" include "almost a hundred guests" who travel in wagons and on foot to the plantation from elsewhere (331) - when the food runs out "the guests returned home and came back the next day with more food" (336), which may mean they are Indians from other tribes or clans. They are "decorous, quiet, patient" (331), and the descriptions of them repeatedly mention the "stiff European finery" and the "bright, stiff, hard finery" they wear for the occasion (331, 339).

During his flight in "Red Leaves," the servant comes face to face with this Indian on "a footlog across a slough" (334). The Indian's appearance is explicitly contrasted with the servant's: the black man is "gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate," the Indian is "thick, soft-looking, the apparent embodiment of the ultimate and the supreme reluctance and inertia" (334). He "makes no move" while the servant rushes away (334).

This white man is described in "Red Leaves" as an "itinerant minister and slave trader" (318). While passing through the Indians' plantation "on a mule" that also carries "a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky," he marries Doom and his West Indian wife (318).

The captain of the slave ship that carries the servant "to America" in "Red Leaves" is described as "drunken" and from "New England" (330). During the voyage, he reads the Bible to the slaves he is transporting.

In "Red Leaves" Doom had a slave as a personal servant. At his death many years earlier, this unnamed slave also ran away to avoid being killed and buried with his master - but he too was pursued and captured.

In "Red Leaves" this stripling attends to Moketubbe on his litter; his pert manner of speaking annoys the older men Three Basket and Louis Berry.

When Issetibbeha takes over the tribe in "Red Leaves" he puts the "young Negroes" in the cabins to "mate" (320) and produce children whom he can sell.

This is the unnamed Union soldier who annoys his superior officer by laughing at Ringo's evasion of the Union lieutenant's questioning in both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Riposte in Tertio."

This is the train brakeman in "Monk" who sees an accomplice help Bill Terrel carry a body through the bushes and "fling it under the train" (59). Although he's clearly observant, the brakeman could not tell if the victim was dead or alive at the time.

The five other black men in the county jail where Lucas is held in Intruder in the Dust are described by the narrative as the "crap-shooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers" who are kept in a single large room on the second floor (30). Some of these Negro prisoners are assigned to what the narrative calls the "street gang" that works outside the jail maintaining town property (54).

The commander of the Union troop that comes to Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris appears first in Will Falls' account of the event in Flags in the Dust, and then again in Louvinia's slightly different account of the same event in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished.

This anomalous 'character' does not appear in either the magazine or book versions of "Vendee." But in the typescript for the story Faulkner included a passing reference to the techniques used by "headhunters" in Borneo that Bayard read about and that he and Ringo apparently employ in skinning Grumby after they succeed in killing him (115). In his edition of the story for Uncollected Stories, Joseph Blotner restores this passage to the text, and so the "headhunters" become an entry in our database.