Character Keys

Calvin Coolidge was the thirtieth President of the United States. He is mentioned peripherally in Sanctuary and The Town, but becomes a peripheral character in "Death Drag" when Ginsfarb bitterly describes the role Coolidge played in his own life, as the antagonist who "ruined" his former business and making him a barnstorming dare-devil to survive (192).

In "Death Drag" Ginsfarb is the barnstorming wing walker who performs the aerobatic stunts suggested by the story's title. His characterization emphasizes his Jewish ethnicity, sometimes in very stereotypical ways. Although he is a "short man," his "nose" would "have fitted a six-foot body" (187); he is so greedy for money that he can't be trusted to negotiate with the small towns the team performs in: "he'd stick out for his price too long" and so might well attract the attention of "anybody that might catch them" running the illegal show (195, 194).

The people in the "good crowd" (198) watching the barnstorming show in "Death Drag" react variously to what happens, especially at its aborted climax: some express disbelief and shock; some of the women faint. Children are also present, and there's a mix of town and country people. One "countrywoman" is repeatedly and vocally skeptical about the authenticity of the show: "You can't tell me" this or that, she says, but is last heard demanding to be taken "right home this minute" when the show's final stunt goes wrong (199-200).

In "Death Drag," these boys are the first to appear at the airfield when the barnstormers land there after having performed a stunt over the town. They are curious about the airplane and the aviators and ask questions that the adults can't or won't. Noticing that "two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves," one asks the "limping man" who turns out to be Ginsfarb, "Were you in the war?" (188). They accompany barnstormers into town, where a boy repeats the question, assuming that the limp is the result of a war injury (192).

In The Town Otis is "nephew or cousin or something" of the Harker who is the engineer at the town's power plant. Although he has "inherited the saw mill" that the older Harker originally ran, Otis fills in at the power plant "whenever Mr. Harker wanted a night off" (26). By the end of the novel he has become Jefferson's "night marshal"; Gavin Stevens calls him one of Yoknapatawpha's "minor clowns" (334).

The Negro fireman who works the night shift at the Jefferson power plant is named "Turl" in "Centaur in Brass" and "Tomey's Turl Beauchamp" in The Town, which re-tells the story of Flem Snopes' attempt to create a rivalry between him and Tom-Tom, the Negro fireman who works the day shift. In The Mansion's reference to this episode in the town's - and Flem's - history, both these men are referred to together as "them two mad skeered Negro firemen" (183).

In "Centaur in Brass" the man who owned the other half of the "small back-street restaurant" in Jefferson that Flem Snopes acquired from Suratt is not named (149). Soon after moving to town, Flem "eliminated" him, presumably by buying him out (150). In The Hamlet Suratt's partner is named Aaron Rideout, Suratt's brother-in law, whereas in the The Town he's Grover Cleveland Winbush. Whether Faulkner had either in mind when he created this "partner" the first time in this story cannot be determined.

Tom-Tom's "third wife" (in "Centaur in Brass," 152) and Tom Tom Bird's "fourth wife" (in The Town, 16) is a "young woman whom he kept with the strictness of a Turk" or "strict jealous seclusion of a Turk" (152, 16) - the analogy is to the stereotype of the harem. The short story describes her as "high yellow" (i.e. light-skinned, 160); the novel just refers to her as "young" (16). In both texts, Turl seems to have no trouble seducing her.

"Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" says that Suratt owns "half of a restaurant" in Jefferson (150). The other half is owned by "his brother-in-law" (141) - which is all we know about this man. (The earlier "Centaur in Brass" said even less about this half-owner. In the later novel The Hamlet this brother-in-law is named Aaron Rideout.)

As an itinerant salesman, of sewing machines and anything else that he can swap or sell, Suratt regularly meets and does business with the lower class population of at least three counties, including Yoknapatawpha. The groups he talks with in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" include men "squatting . . . on the porch of a crossroads store," and "women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots" (138).

The "first goat owner" whom Suratt visits in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" has already sold all his goats to Flem Snopes (139).

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" this polite "small boy in overalls" whom Suratt sees beside the barn three miles from town does not get his joke about Flem and goats (140).

Suratt does not bother going to see the third man who he heard owns goats, because he assumes this man too - whom "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" calls "the other goat owner" - has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes as well (140).

In both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, these women help Mrs. Armstid cope with her circumstances by giving her materials - "string saved from packages and bits of cloth" to weave into "fancy objects" she can sell ("Lizards," 142) . In The Hamlet Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" (360).

In "Smoke," Emma Dukinfield is Judge Dukinfield’s daughter. She herself doesn't appear in the story, but the "small, curiously chased brass box" (25) that she brings back from Europe as a present for him plays a crucial role in solving the Judge's murder.

In "Smoke," this county functionary investigates Anselm Holland’s despoliation of the Mardis Cemetery.

The foreman of the grand jury in "Smoke" listens to, objects to, but ultimately pays heed to county attorney Gavin Steven’s conjectures.

In "Monk" the residents of the hill country from which Monk hails are a "clannish people," and fiercely independent. These descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers live in a country "impenetrable and almost uncultivated" where they "intermarried and made whiskey and shot at all strangers from behind log barns and snake fences." The narrator points out that they seem to know "as little about him [Monk] as we did" (43).

In "Smoke" the grand jury that sits to hear Gavin's case in the inquiry into Judge Dukinfield’s murder is all-male and -white (in Mississippi at that time, only white males were eligible for jury duty), but presumably were drawn from different classes.

In "Smoke" this man - referred to by Gavin Stevens only as "a nigger" - reports to Stevens that a "big car was parked in Virginius Holland’s barn the night before Judge Dukinfield was killed" (29).

In "Smoke," Old Anse is known to be "a ruthless man" in part because of the "tales told about him by both white and negro tenants" (3). These "tenants" are share-croppers who farm parcels of land on the Mardis-Holland property for a portion of the money when the crop is sold.

"Miss Zilphia Gant" begins with Jim Gant, who in its first sentence is described as "a stock trader" (368). The next sentence explains that the stock in this case are "horses and mules," which he sells in the "Memphis markets" (368). He is the father of Miss Zilphia, though he abandons her and her mother when she was a "two-year-old girl" (369), and disappears from the narrative after he and his lover are killed not far from the Memphis markets by his wife, who tracks them down.

"Miss Zilphia Gant" covers 40 years in the life of its title character. During that whole time the narrator and town continue to call her "Miss Zilphia," although she was married at least once. Physically, she is "pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes" for most of her life (372), but "plump in a flabby sort of way" at others (375), sickly "from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair" (372), and beset in her "ineradicable virginity" by insomnia and dreams (379).

This is the "daughter" who is born to the "girl whom [Zilphia] used to visit" when a teenager (374); the narrator of "Miss Zilphia Gant" notes that at least some of the dresses this child wears were made by Zilphia.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this "a hulking halfwitted boy" helps Jim Gant in his work as a trader (368). It is he who tells Mrs. Gant that her husband has left her, when he tries to collect the $1.75 he loaned to Gant; when she refuses at gun point to give him any money, he becomes "an ancient mariner in faded overalls" as - "wild eyed and drooling a little at the mouth" - he relates his grievance repeatedly to the other people in the Bend (370).

"Miss Zilphia Gant" leaves it up to its readers to decide for themselves about the identity of the girl that Zilphia brings back to Jefferson at the end, claiming that she is her own daughter. The cues provided by the text, however, make it probable that this girl (whom the narrator calls "little Zilphia," 381) is the daughter of the painter Zilphia married many years earlier and his second wife: for example, the girl has "eyes like wood ashes and dark hair," both traits she shares with that husband (381, 375).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the "oldish" man in "in the background" at the tavern where Gant stays is vividly described as a drunkard "with cunning reddish pig's eyes and matted hair which lent a kind of ferocity to the weak face which they concealed," but beyond that his place in the narrative remains vague (368). It's likely that he is Mrs. Vinson's husband or father, but all the text says about their relationship is that they are occasionally heard "cursing one another in the back" of the tavern (369).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant, Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). The dreams that feature "negro men" cause her to "wake wide-eyed" (380).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," Mrs. Gant "borrows a pistol from another neighbor" when she leaves the Bend to get revenge on her husband (369). We know this 'other' neighbor is not the woman with whom she leaves Zilphia, but that is all the text makes explicit; that this neighbor's is male is our assumption.

One of the two people with "young faces" in Light in August who stop and let Joe Christmas into their car when they see him standing beside the road, naked and carrying Joanna's pistol (283). She reacts to him with terror.

The "delinquent girls" who live in a Memphis institution do not appear in Light in August, except as the recipients of charity from Reverend Hightower (58).

In Light in August the "elders" at Hightower's seminary, "the high and sanctified men who are the destiny of the church" (478), are the men whom he has to convince to send him to Jefferson. They are also called "the hierarchate of the Church" (482).

In Light in August these "boys in identical overalls, who live within a three mile radius" of the McEachern farm," are "fourteen and fifteen" years old when, with Joe, they arrange to have sex with a Negro girl in a deserted sawmill shed (156). When Joe's "turn" comes, however, and he begins to beat her instead, the "other four" fight him to make him stop (157). Joe is presumably with the same "four or five" boys later in the novel when one of them describes menstruation (184).

Like her husband, this woman is "not old" (494). In Light in August, she listens and asks questions as her husband tells the story of meeting Lena and Byron on the road to Tennessee. Also like her husband, she seems to enjoy their intimacy and the comedy of Byron's attempted intimacies with Lena.

In Light of August this group of five or six Negroes encounters Christmas on his way back to the Burden place. When they see him, they cross "to one side of the road, the voices ceasing" (117). One of them is named Jupe.

In a strange anticipation of its own narrative, Light in August introduces this "acquaintance" who lives "in the town" and who tells the "stranger" who has noticed the sign in front of Hightower's house a very abbreviated version of the story of Reverend Hightower, his wife, and his twenty-five years in Jefferson (59-60). Two pages later the part of the stranger new to Jefferson will be played by Byron Bunch and the same story will be told to him in greater detail by "them," a collective town-as-narrator (60-73).

This is the "Jefferson woman shopping in Memphis" in Light in August who sees Mrs. Hightower going into a hotel when she is supposed to be visiting her family in Mississippi (64). When this woman returns home, she tells others what she saw.

In one of the many scenes of pursuit in Light in August, Nathaniel and Juana spend several years searching for a "white preacher" (as opposed to a "priest") to marry them suggests how scarce the Protestant preachers were in the novel's vision of the frontier (247). It's not said where the "preacher" who does marry them in Kansas is from, but on the "Saturday night" before the Sunday wedding he arrives at the Burden home from somewhere else (250).

In Light in August the lawyer McEachern visits in the town that is five miles from his farm to do "business" with has an office near the courthouse there (173).

This is the "second man" who is at Max's house when Joe arrives there looking for Bobbie in Light in August; Joe had "never seen" him before, but he is obviously a kind of partner in Max and Mame's prostitution racket (214). He certainly dresses the part of a gangster from this era: "His hat was tipped forward so that the shadow of the brim fell across his mouth" (214). He assists Max and Mame's hasty departure from town. He beats Joe into insensibility.

This is the "man" in Light in August who finds Hightower in the woods about a mile from town, tied to a tree and beaten unconscious (72).

In Light in August the matron of the (all-white) orphanage in Memphis is "past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes" (133). When she hears that Joe Christmas is being called a Negro, she decides to place him with a family as quickly as possible. She seems to have the child's interests at heart, both in making sure Christmas doesn't have to go to the "colored" orphanage, and in keeping the rumors about his race from McEachern, the white man who adopts him.

The phrase "Grand Jury" suggests "something" "secret" and "of a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye" to Percy Grimm's platoon of peace-keepers (456). In Light in August the "Grand Jury" that is empaneled to consider the charges against Joe Christmas does remain mysterious. The narrator, for example, says that "the Grand Jury . . .

After Hightower refuses to resign from his pulpit in the Presbyterian church in Light in August, members of other churches in Jefferson come to see him "out of curiosity for a time" (69). The other main denominations in Jefferson are Episcopalian, Baptist and Methodist.

On the fourth day of his flight in Light in August Christmas smells breakfast cooking at a farm house, but waits to approach it until he sees "the men" of the farm finish eating and "go to the field" (332).

The "clump of men" sitting in Max's restaurant the first time Christmas goes there in Light in August are described as "not farmers and not townsmen either"; with "their tilted hats and their cigarettes and their odor of barbershops," they look like they "had just got off a train," "would be gone tomorrow," and do "not have any address" (178, 174).

In Light in August this man is killed by Nathaniel Burden, after claiming that Nathaniel stole his horse. The messenger who reports this event to Nathaniel's family says that "Folks claim the Mexican never owned no horse" (244).

In Light in August Joe Christmas and Joe Brown make enough money selling illegal whiskey in Jefferson to quit their jobs at the planing mill and buy a car. The narrative refers several times to the men who buy from them, but the closest it ever comes to individualizing these customers is when it says that the "young men and even boys" in town all know that they can purchase whiskey "from Brown almost on sight" (46).

The Negro who gives Christmas a ride into Mottstown in Light in August tells him that he is going there to pick up "a yellin calf" that "pappy bought" (339). "Yellin" almost certainly means 'yearling,' and "pappy" presumably means 'father.'