Character Keys

"Drummers," as traveling salesmen were called, appear three times in Sanctuary sitting in chairs or standing or getting into a "bus" along the curb outside the hotel in Jefferson, first when Horace gets a room for Ruby, again the morning after he speaks with Temple, and then again when he waits in the hotel for a train to take him back to Kinston (124).

In The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin looks around after Shreve pumps water on his face, he sees a "woman cross the door" of a nearby house, "but she didn't look out" (165).

Minnie Cooper, the central character in "Dry September," is a Jefferson woman, "thirty-eight or thirty-nine" years of age (173); although the story is vague on this point, it is apparently her accusation of assault against Will Mayes the precipitates the lynching. She is described as "still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress" (174). Never married, she lives with her mother and aunt, and has received local derision for her romantic travails and, more recently, her drinking.

Henry Hawkshaw first appears in "Dry September." He is a Jefferson barber, described as "a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face" (169). He serves as the point of view through which the story's racial violence is presented. He tries to defend Will Mayes' character against the white men who want to lynch him, and even drives with them hoping to prevent the lynching, but in the end only 'saves' himself or at least his sensibility. When he re-appears in "Hair," his liberal sensibilities are again put into action, this time romantically.

Mrs. McLendon appears at the end of "Dry September" as the "pale, strained, and weary-looking" wife of the man who leads the lynching party (182). When he comes home at midnight and finds her reading a magazine, he accuses her of waiting up for him, and strikes her.

This is one of the barber shop clients in "Dry September" who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes. Unlike the "drummer" and the client who "had been a soldier" (172), he is not individualized in any particular way. Although he worries that the other men are talking too loudly, he goes along with them on the lynching.

This man may exist, or be a figment of Minnie Cooper's imagination, or even an invention of the customer in the barber shop who refers to him, obliquely, as the "man scare" that Minnie reportedly had "about a year" before "Dry September" begins; the customer describes him as "a man on the kitchen roof" who was looking at Minnie "undress" (171). We have labeled him 'white' because from the larger story it seems clear that if the reported voyeur had been identified as 'black,' the white men of the town would have had to punish someone.

The boys and girls who are Minnie Cooper's "contemporaries" and "schoolmates" begin to ostracize her before they are finished with high school, apparently because her "people," while "comfortable," are "not the best" people (174). They grow up to date and marry each other and have their own families, leaving Minnie on the sidelines of the town's life.

The "sitting and lounging men" on the town Square appear in "Dry September" twice (175). The first time sums up the way they "do not even follow [Minnie Cooper] with their eyes any more," after she passes a certain age (175). The second time is when Minnie and her friends go to the movie while the lynching is occurring outside town, after the town has heard about the reported assault on her: "even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and follow with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs" (181).

The youngest of Temple's four brothers in Sanctuary, Hubert is the only one given a name. He is actually given two: Hubert and Buddy. He told Temple "that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he'd beat the hell out of me" (55). He is a student at Yale, but is there with his brothers at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as one of the the "four younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

One of the two brothers of Temple Drake in Sanctuary who "are lawyers" (54), and one of the four who appear at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

In Sanctuary one of Temple Drake's brothers is a "newspaper man" (54). But when he finally appears in the narrative, at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial, he is indistinguishable from the other three: one of the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

"Frank" is mentioned in Sanctuary by Ruby in the bitter conversation she has with Temple. He was a young suitor who wanted to elope with her, but when he insisted on going back to her house to tell her father about their intentions, "father shot him" (58). As Ruby says, Frank "wasn't a coward" (58). To Ruby's brother, who also wants to kill him, Frank is "the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy" (58) - a detail that suggests Frank might be more prosperous than her family.

The narrator of Sanctuary tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135).

Ruby Lamar is a former Memphis prostitute who appears in Sanctuary as the devoted common-law wife of Lee Goodwin and conscientious mother of their very young child. Earlier she moved to San Francisco and New York to wait for Lee while he was serving overseas, and when he is sentenced to prison for killing fellow U.S. soldier in a fight over another woman, she not only moves to Leavenworth to be near him, but hires a lawyer for him, using her body as payment. When Lee is arrested for killing Tommy, she is prepared to pay Horace the same way.

In Sanctuary the man who fathered Popeye is a professional strike breaker who marries Popeye's mother when she gets pregnant and then, less than three weeks later, runs off - leaving her and the child with a disease that was probably syphilis.

During the testimony that Temple Drake of Jackson, Mississippi, gives under oath in Sanctuary, she says her mother is dead (285). In Requiem for a Nun, however, Gowan takes Temple's son Bucky to spend a week "with [his] grandparents in New Orleans" (136) -
which resurrects Mrs. Drake and moves her to Louisiana. While in the first novel Temple often thinks of her father, and she refers to him again in the second, her mother is only mentioned in these two incompatible ways.

Miss Lorraine is one of the two women in Sanctuary who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after Red's funeral. (The context suggests they might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) Lorraine is the "thin woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses" (250). The narrator refers to her "flat spinster's breast" (256) and several times compares her appearance to that of "a school-teacher" (251, 258).

"A fattish man with thin, curly hair," whose eyeglasses seem to be worn only "for decorum's sake" (149), Dr. Quinn treats Temple when she first arrives at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary. Initially he refused to make a house call on Sunday, but Reba reminds him that she "can put him in jail three times over" (148).

On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford in Sanctuary are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). One is unnamed, but he calls the other one "Shack," presumably a nickname derived from the confectionery near the college campus (169). "Shack" whistles a "broken dance rhythm" that the narrator calls "meaningless, vertiginous" (169-70).

Despite his name, in Sanctuary "Uncle Bud" is a "small bullet-headed boy of five or six" (250), "with freckles like splotches of huge summer rain on a sidewalk" (251). He is related somehow to Miss Myrtle, though he is only staying with her temporarily, and will soon "go back home" (252) to "a Arkansaw farm" (251) - perhaps the same Arkansas orphanage where the four children whom Reba is supporting live. He is adept at "snitching beer" (253); after he breaks into the icebox and drinks a whole bottle, he brings Chapter 25 to a close by throwing up.

In Sanctuary Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment after that.

While Sanctuary describes the jailer's wife as "a lank, slattern woman," her insistence on giving Ruby a bed after the Baptists got her thrown out of the hotel, despite her husband's reluctance to do so - "I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child," she says; "I don't keer whut Ed says" - is welcomed by Horace (181).

In Sanctuary only one of the three town boys - young men from Oxford instead of the university - who spend time with Gowan is named. This entry represents the one whom the narrative refers to as "the first," because he speaks first. He wants to know who "that son bitch" driving Temple away from the dance is (30). We hear the class resentments in that voice he tells his friend Doc things like "you're not good enough to go to a college dance" (30).

This bailiff appears in only one sentence in Sanctuary, when the judge at Popeye's trial consults with him about getting the accused man a lawyer.

This judge in Sanctuary makes sure Popeye has a lawyer, denies him bail, and sentences him to be hanged after the jury convicts him.

In the hours before Popeye's execution in Sanctuary, this minister prays for him several times, and repeatedly tries without success to get Popeye to pray for himself.

This is the sheriff in Sanctuary who, with a sarcastic comment, "springs the trap" when Popeye is executed by hanging (316).

In Sanctuary Ruby worked in New York during the First World War; according to her, the city was "full of soldiers with money to spend" (278). The "New York Port of Embarkation" - the first officially designated embarkation point for soldiers and supplies sent to Europe - included Hoboken and Brooklyn.

The aunt of Temple who lives "up north" in Sanctuary may really exist, though it is clear that when the local newspaper in Jackson publishes the news that Temple's father has sent his daughter to spend time with this woman, that is a fiction intended to cover Temple's disappearance from college (176).

When Temple in Sanctuary thinks of the baseball game in Starkville that she is missing, she imagines "the green diamond dotted with players." The description of their playing is unmistakably in Faulkner's words, however, not hers: "encouraging one another with short meaningless cries, plaintive, wary and forlorn" (37).

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this "plump blonde woman" and "a man" get out of a taxi (192). The couple's behavior outside the door causes Fonzo to suck in his breath, and Virgil to assume that they must be married, but while the narrator never says so explicitly, it's clear enough that she is a prostitute and he is one of her customers. She disappears into the house.

In Sanctuary the man who drives the truck carrying the moonshine that Lee Goodwin makes from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis complains about having to wait for Horace, to whom he is giving a ride to Jefferson. "I got a woman waiting for me," he says (21).

In Sanctuary Temple tells Gowan that she knows "a boy at home" who owns a Packard automobile like the one that Popeye drives (49).

In Sanctuary the group that visits the undertaker's parlor to get a glimpse of Tommy's body consists of boys "with and without schoolbooks" who press against the window and the "bolder" young men of the town who go inside the building, "in twos and threes," for a closer look (112).

In Sanctuary, according to Ruby, her brother is just as determined as her father to keep her apart from Frank, the man she loves. He tells his sister he's going to kill him, "in his yellow buggy" (58). His ambush is foiled by her.

During Lee's trial in Sanctuary the District Attorney mentions "the chemist" who has already testified, presumably about the blood stain on the corn-cob (283).

In Sanctuary, when Temple thinks of the college baseball game in Starkville that she is missing, she imagines, briefly, "the band, the yawning glitter of the bass horn" (37).

In Sanctuary this is the young man "at school," whom Temple notices in Dumfries when she stops there with Popeye stops in his car. The reader never sees him, but Temple says "he was almost looking right at me!" (140).

This is the girl in Sanctuary who told the Dean that Temple was "slipping out at night," in retaliation for the fact that Temple went out "with a boy she liked" (57).

The "committee" of Jefferson Baptists in Sanctuary who protest against allowing a woman like Ruby to stay in the town's hotel in do not directly appear. The proprietor of the hotel refers to "these church ladies," but it's not clear whether they were the committee - or the group that sent the committee. In either case, the proprietor tells Horace that "once [them ladies] get set on a thing," a man "might just as well give up and do like they say" (180).

Sanctuary provides the "old" Kinston man who drives Horace home from the train with a fairly intricate story. "In the old days" he was at the head of local society, "a planter, a landholder, son of one of the first settlers." But when the town "boomed" into sudden prosperity, he lost his property "through greed and gullibility" and for the last several decades has made a living as a taxi driver. With his "gray moustache with waxed ends" and his "suit of grey striped with red," however, he still gives off an air of gentility (297-98).

In Sanctuary the Grotto employee in charge of the "crap table" (as the narrative calls it, though it is usually referred to as a craps table) is called "the dealer" when he speaks his one line in the novel: "'Eleven,' he said" (240).

This boy falls while delivering groceries to Popeye's mother on his bike in Sanctuary. By breaking the bottle of olive oil she ordered, he sets off a series of unfortunate incidents - but is himself unapologetic about the original mishap, telling the customer "you ought to buy that oil in cans" and "you want to have that gate fixed" (305).

In the hallway of the Negro brothel that Clarence takes them to, Virgil and Fonzo see "a drunk white man in greasy overalls" arguing with two Negro men (198). His overalls identify him as lower class, and tell us something about the socio-economic standing of the brothel's clientele, but no other details, about the man or the argument, are given in Sanctuary.

This clerk works inside the "dingy confectionery" in Dumfries where Popeye buys gas, cigarettes, candy and a sandwich in Sanctuary (140).

No name is mentioned when Temple tells Ruby that the "gu-governor comes to our house" for dinner (56). The real Governor of Mississippi when Sanctuary was published was Theodore G. Bilbo, an outspoken white supremacist - but it's not necessary to believe that Faulkner intended readers to think of specifically of him. Temple's intention seems to be simply to assert her caste status as a shield.

The Mississippi Governor in "Monk" is almost surely modeled on Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, who served two terms in that office (1916-20 and 1928-32) and as a U.S. Senator from 1934 until his death in 1947. He, like the Governor in "Monk," is "a man without ancestry" (53), and is charged with trading in pardons for political gain. As a critic of the Governor's "puppet" Pardon Board, Gavin Stevens implies that the Governor is just another crooked politician more concerned with garnering votes than dispensing any actual justice; the Governor seems comfortable admitting that is the case.

"A thick, muscle-bound, bullet-headed man" wearing a badly fitting dinner jacket (243), the bouncer at the Grotto club in Sanctuary is put to work when he tries to remove a rowdy guest at Red's funeral and is attacked by four men. The funeral ends when they crash into the bier and spill Red's body out of the coffin.