Character Keys

Waiters appear in both scenes set in the Grotto club in Sanctuary. In Chapter 25, describing the funeral for Red, they are clearly identified as "negro waiters, in black shirts beneath starched jackets." In the previous chapter, however, the narrative describes the two waiters who place drinks in front of Temple and Popeye in more racially ambiguous terms: seen from Temple's perspective they appear as "a brown [hand] in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff" (235). Also in Chapter 24, "a waiter" shows Temple to a private room, where Red joins her (238).

This "old half-crazed white woman" in Sanctuary is one of Jefferson's most eccentric inhabitants (200). The physical description of her is equally striking: her "lank grayish hair" hangs beside "the glittering collapse of her face" (201). She is reported to make her living by "manufactur[ing] spells for negroes" (200), though her house was also once raided by "officers searching for whiskey" (201). Horace arranges for Ruby to stay in the "lean-to shed room" attached to her house. (This woman may recur as "Mrs.

The second husband of Popeye's maternal grandmother appears in and disappears from Sanctuary in half a paragraph. We see "an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache" who is very handy maintaining the boarding house his wife owns, until the day he walks out with a check to pay the butcher and instead vanishes with all the money she has saved (304).

When she imagines herself dead as a way to escape Popeye's sexual assault in Sanctuary, Temple's fantasy includes "all the people sitting around the coffin, saying Dont she look sweet" (219).

In an odd aside, Sanctuary notes that the "suit of gray" worn by the "old man" in Kinston who drives the taxi was "made by Jews in the New York tenement district" (298). Many different ethnicities worked in the city's garment industry and belonged to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (founded in 1900), but the stereotype of the Jewish garment worker was widespread in the 1920s.

Because they felt sorry about his handicap, the unnamed law professors who taught Eustace Graham at the "State University" in Sanctuary "groomed him like a race-horse" (262).

In Sanctuary within a few hours after Lee is convicted - formally for Tommy's murder, and in the minds of the townspeople for Temple's rape - the crowd that gathers in the Square turns into a lynch mob of "antic" figures who burn him to death (296). We see the confused scene through Horace's eyes. He registers running men, "panting shouts," a "circle" that has gathered around a "blazing mass" (295-96), but only one member of the mob is individualized: a man "carrying a five-gallon coal oil can" which explodes in his hands.

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this man get out of a taxi with a "plump blonde woman" (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. He leaves in the taxi after dropping her off at the house.

In Sanctuary Horace sees but cannot overhear this "gesticulant" man in "his shirt sleeves" haranguing the crowd that gathers in front of the jail after Lee Goodwin is convicted (293). While it seems certain that he is inciting them to violence against Lee, the crowd remains "quite orderly" after he finishes "talking himself out" (293).

Sanctuary simply refers to the people eating dinner when Ruby comes in to use the phone as "Tull's family" (105). The story "Spotted Horses" (which was published a few months after Sanctuary) is a bit more forthcoming, listing "his wife and three daughters and Mrs. Tull's aunt." On that basis we identify the gender of the family as "female."

In Sanctuary this porter at the door of the Hotel Gayoso offers to carry Virgil and Fonzo's suitcases, but they "brush past him" (190).

In Sanctuary the men lounging at the Taylor station who watch Temple as she gets off the train are "chewing slowly" (presumably tobacco) and wearing overalls (36).

When Horace goes downtown on his second day in Jefferson in Sanctuary, he renews his acquaintance with the men he meets around the courthouse: "merchants and professional men," most of whom "remembered him as a boy" (112). They are not otherwise characterized.

On the train to Oxford in Sanctuary are "three middle-aged women" who cannot find seats, because of the "gay rudeness" of the college students who pushed into the car ahead of them (169).

When Temple thinks about her father "sitting on the porch at home" in Sanctuary, she imagines that he is "watching a negro mow the lawn" (51).

The "negro porter of the hotel" where Ruby stays in Sanctuary (135) briefly appears in three separate scenes: showing Ruby to her room in Chapter 16, fetching Horace to the hotel in Chapter 17, and showing Horace where he can wait for a train in Chapter 29. Faulkner may have been thinking of one man in all three cases, or two, or three.

Sanctuary does not name this man, except as the "murderer" (114) who is awaiting his execution in the jail when Goodwin is locked up there. He killed his wife with a razor. According to another unnamed black character, he is the "bes ba'ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!" His constant singing of "spirituals" and blues songs in jail, accompanied by a "chorus" of other blacks outside the window, provides a kind of soundtrack for the novel's main narrative (114-15).

The prostitutes who work at the less expensive Memphis brothel to which Clarence takes Virgil and Fonzo in Sanctuary are described as "coffee-colored" (199). Their dresses are "bright," their hair is "ornate" and their smiles are "golden" (199).

Outside the county jail in Sanctuary these Negroes gather in the evenings and sing with the man inside awaiting execution. They wear "natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls" (114), and have "work-thickened shoulders" (124).

This is the neighbor of Popeye's mother in Sanctuary who reports him for "cutting up a half-grown kitten" (309). It may be the neighbor who reported the fire in the boarding house earlier, but the text gives no indication of that.

In Sanctuary, when Temple and her father sit down "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris, this "old woman" comes to them "with decrepit promptitude" to collect the money - four sous - for the seats (316).

These "two shabby negro men" in Sanctuary whom Clarence, Virgil and Fonzo see arguing with a white man in the hallway of the Negro brothel in Memphis; they may work there (as bouncers, perhaps), or may be customers themselves (198).

During Horace's first conversation with Lee Goodwin in his jail cell, the child that Ruby is holding is compared by the narrator of Sanctuary to "the children which beggars on Paris streets carry" (116). Horace has been to France, and is carrying a French novel when the novel begins. The novel's final scene is set in Paris. Still, in the immediate context of the narrow cell that confines Goodwin, the narrative's sudden evocation of life half a world away from Yoknapatawpha comes as a surprise.

Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "men playing croquet . . . in coats and capes" (316).

These are the various dancers and gamblers "at the crap table" (237) who are at the Grotto club the night Popeye takes Temple there in Sanctuary. The dancers are summed up in the phrase about the "movement of feet, the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the blood" (233).

In Sanctuary this servant works for the unnamed wealthy woman who befriends Popeye's mother. She is not specifically referred to as a Negro, but since nearly all the domestic servants in the fictions are black, we have chosen to identify her that way.

Miss Reba's description of the police commissioner who patronizes her brothel in Sanctuary is memorable: "a man fifty years old, seven foot tall, with a head like a peanut" (143). Her description of his behavior with one of her prostitute is even more unforgettable: when his cronies broke into the room "they found him buck-nekkid, dancing the highland fling" (143).

Sanctuary describes the people who live in "the restricted district" of Memphis through which Red's funeral procession passes in terms of their "faces," which "peer from beneath lowered shades" as it goes by (249). While it is not absolutely clear what "restricted district" refers to, the point of this passage seems to be to juxtapose two worlds in Memphis: the underworld and the respectable (but intimidated) citizenry.

Sanctuary refers generically to the various residents of Oxford who see Temple in the evenings, as she hurries to or from a date. The group includes "townspeople taking after-supper drives," "bemused faculty-members" and graduate students (28).

In Sanctuary the people who attend the "children's party" that the wealthy woman in Pensacola holds for Popeye are referred to simply as "guests," and not described at all (309).

Sanctuary describes the people who watch Lee Goodwin's trial from Horace's perspective as he enters the courtroom. From this point of view they are a collection of "heads": "bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sun-baked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat" (281). The details suggest that the crowd is mostly male, but drawn from almost all the local social classes. There is, however, no suggestion that any of these people aren't white.

In Sanctuary, in order to try to find out where Narcissa went after he sees her in "disappear into a door" in town, Horace asks all the clerks "within the radius of where she must have turned" if they've seen her (261).

This telephone operator is heard in Sanctuary as "a detached Delsarte-ish voice" that informs Horace his call to Miss Reba has ended (268). (Francois Delsarte was a Frenchman whose instructions for proper pronunciation became famous at the end of the 19th century.)

The central office telephone operator - hence called "Central" in The Mansion, at one time a familiar way of referring to telephone operators (413) - who connects Ratliff's long-distance call from Parchman to Gavin Stevens in Jefferson.

One of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers is named "Ed" (260). We are assuming he is the judge who is first referred to only as "the night telegraph operator at the depot" (229), but it's just as possible that the first name of Mr. McDiarmid, the other judge, is Ed.

The "official" on the train in Sanctuary who "shakes his fist" at Temple for jumping off at Taylor may be the conductor, or perhaps a chaperone from the college (36).

In Sanctuary Horace sees Clarence Snopes talking with "four men" in the smoker car on the train from Oxford to Holly Springs (175).

After Popeye is convicted in Sanctuary, this "turnkey" shows considerable solicitude for him, buying cigarettes for him with the money Popeye gives him, but also sharing information about the murdered man and even, on the day of his execution, trying to give Popeye his change (312).

The administrator in Sanctuary who puts Temple on academic probation "for slipping out at night," i.e. for dating on weeknights, is referred to simply as "the Dean" (57) - perhaps the Dean of Women Students.

In Sanctuary the "male quartet" hired for Red's funeral from "a vaudeville house" brings "the older women" to tears "singing mother songs" and "Sonny Boy" "in close harmony" (247).

In Sanctuary Ruby tells Temple that she once gave away a fur coat "to a woman in an alley" (62). Ruby lived in many different places, so there's no way to tell what city the alley might be in - and the text provides no other information about the woman at all.

Among the people attending Red's funeral in Sanctuary, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.

During the First World War, Ruby worked in New York City, where according to her description in Sanctuary "even the little ratty girls [were] wearing silk," presumably as presents from all the "soldiers with money to spend" (278).

Mr. Lovelady's daughter is mentioned in passing in "That Evening Sun." She is described as a "child, a little girl," who lives in the hotel with her father and mother (308). When her mother commits suicide, though, Lovelady "and the child went away" (308). He returns alone, and we learn nothing more about his child's fate.

In "That Evening Sun," Nancy tells the Compson children that "I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady" - or as Quentin's narrative explains, Mr. Lovelady is "a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents" toward a fund to pay for their funerals (308). He lives at the hotel with his wife and only daughter. Though he and his family occupy only part of a paragraph, the details of their story are provocative: Mrs. Lovelady commits suicide, and after leaving town with his daughter, Mr.

This "queen" is the protagonist of the grim fairy tale that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). Like Nancy, she "has to cross a ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door," but is afraid of the "bad man" who is hiding in the ditch (303). The question of the racial identity of these characters is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black. This "queen" then is the only upper class Negro character in Faulkner's fiction.

Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun" begins by evoking the "Negro women" who used to carry the clothes they had washed for their white customers in bundles on their heads (289); now they fetch and deliver it in automobiles or have lost their jobs to commercial laundry services.

The name "Das" is a common South Asian name, derived from Sanskrit. One of its meanings, however, is 'servant,' so it may be used by the subadar in "Ad Astra" not as a name but as a kind of title or label. In either case, this character is "the headman" who supervises the native military personnel; after the battalion's disastrous attack on German lines, he reluctantly admits to the subadar that his troops crossed No Man's Land with unloaded rifles, and almost their entire batallion was annihilated (425).

The character in "Ad Astra" named Hume is probably another Allied aviator, but in the story his role is to narrate the way Sartoris managed to avenge his brother's death.