Character Keys
Code![]() |
title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
2042 | Mr. Black |
The narrator of "Death Drag" refers to him only as "the driver" and "the driver of the car," but we learn his name when one of the boys whom he lets ride with him by standing on the car's running boards calls him "Mr. Black" (189). He gives the three barnstormers a lift from the airfield to town. |
|
2043 | Calvin Coolidge |
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). |
|
2044 | Unnamed Airplane Passengers |
In "Death Drag" these "Fourth-of-July holidayers" died when, "about two years ago," Jock was forced to crash land the plane he was giving them a ride in, breaking the gas line, and one of them "struck a match" (194). |
|
2045 | Ginsfarb |
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). |
|
2046 | Jones |
In "Death Drag," Jock goes to see Jones, "the secretary of the Fair Association," for permission to use the air field for a barnstorming show (188). There is no indication of Jones' day job, but his civic title suggests he belongs to the middle class of respectable "groundlings" in the story (188). |
|
2047 | Unnamed Spectators at Air Show |
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). |
|
2048 | Unnamed Newspaper Editor 1 |
The "editor" of the local newspaper in "Death Drag" also does print jobs, like the handbill advertising the air show that Ginsfarb asks him to print (190). He expresses skepticism about the details of the performance, and when he demands payment in advance - "I ain't in this business for fun," he tells Ginsfarb - the job gets cancelled (191). |
|
2049 | Unnamed Boys at Airfield |
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). |
|
2050 | Mr. Harker |
Harker is the night engineer of the municipal power plant in Jefferson in both "Centaur in Brass" and The Town. In both the story and the novel he serves as a source of the story of Flem Snopes' effort to embezzle by turning the plant's two Negro firemen against each other. His attitude toward the events is mostly that of a bemused spectator, though in the novel's re-telling of the episode he actively intervenes to help the two Negroes recognize that their real antagonist is the white Snopes. |
|
2051 | Otis Harker |
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). |
|
2052 | Major Hoxey |
In "Centaur in Brass" the mayor of Jefferson who is reportedly having an affair with Mrs. Flem Snopes is named Hoxey; according to town gossip, this affair account's for "her husband's rise in Hoxey's administration" (151). Hoxey is described the town's "lone rich middle-aged bachelor" and "a graduate of Yale" (151). His relationship with Mrs. Snopes clearly prefigures Eula Snopes' and Mayor Manfred de Spain's affair in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. |
|
2053 | Turl |
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). |
|
2054 | Unnamed Negro Neighbors |
Near the conclusion of "Centaur in Brass" Faulkner reveals that Flem Snopes lives in a bungalow on the bedraggled outskirts of town in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168). |
|
2055 | Unnamed Partner in Restaurant |
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. |
|
2056 | Unnamed Restaurant Manager 1 |
In "Centaur in Brass," after "eliminating" the partner with whom he co-owns the restaurant, Flem Snopes procures a "hired manager" to run it (150). More cipher than character, this man's presence solidifies the town's opinion that the source of Flem's success in Jefferson is his beautiful wife. (Elsewhere in the fictions, when Flem moves on from the restaurant he puts a relative, one of his many 'cousins,' in it, but there's no indication that this "manager" is Flem's kin.) |
|
2057 | Unnamed Wife of Tom-Tom|Mrs. Bird |
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. |
|
2058 | Unnamed First Rider |
One of the many people who gather on the Old Frenchman's place in "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" to watch Henry Armstid digging for treasure is distinguished from the group as "the first rider" (137). That is an unusual locution, but may just mean that he was riding by on a mule - or less likely, a horse - when he became the first person to stop to watch Armstid. He is chased away by Armstid, and then, presumably, spreads the word about what Armstid is doing. |
|
2059 | Unnamed Brother-in-Law of Suratt |
"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.) |
|
2060 | Unnamed Boy and Girl |
In "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140). |
|
2061 | Unnamed Customers of Suratt |
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). |
|
2062 | Unnamed Descendants of the Frenchman's Slaves |
Both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and The Hamlet refer to the enslaved people who labored on the Frenchman's place before the Civil War as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136, 375). Nothing more is said, but implicitly this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which millions of southern blacks moved to northern cities (a movement that was just beginning at the time the story and the novel take place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s |
|
2063 | Unnamed First Goat Owner |
The "first goat owner" whom Suratt visits in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" has already sold all his goats to Flem Snopes (139). |
|
2064 | Unnamed Second Goat Owner |
in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" the "second goat owner" lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139). |
|
2065 | Unnamed Small Boy with Goat |
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). |
|
2066 | Unnamed People Who Watch Armstid |
There's no question that Henry Armstid has driven himself mad "spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy" ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 137) in his "spent and unflagging fury" (The Hamlet, 404) to find buried treasure where there is none. But in both these texts there is something equally disconcerting about the fixed stare on the faces of the country people who gather from many miles around to watch him dig for "a week" (in the short story, 136) or even "two weeks" (in the novel, 404). |
|
2067 | Unnamed Third Goat Owner |
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). |
|
2068 | Unnamed Treasure Hunters |
According to "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard": "For sixty years three generations of sons and grandsons" have snuck onto the abandoned Frenchman's place at night, digging into its dirt in search of "the gold and the silver, the money and the plate" that was reputedly hidden there during the Civil War (136). Nothing has ever been found. |
|
2069 | Unnamed Women in Jefferson 1 |
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). |
|
2070 | Granby Dodge |
In "Smoke" Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words. |
|
2071 | Emma Dukinfield |
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. |
|
2072 | Mr. Mardis |
Mr. Mardis is the father Cornelia Mardis. He owns two thousand acres of the finest farming land in Yoknapatawpha. The "five generations" of Mardises in the family cemetery suggest how long his people have been in Yoknapatawpha (8), though the family doesn't appear elsewhere in the fictions. On his death, Mr. Mardis leaves his property to his daughter, rather than to her husband, Anselm Holland. |
|
2073 | Unnamed County Health Officer |
In "Smoke," this county functionary investigates Anselm Holland’s despoliation of the Mardis Cemetery. |
|
2074 | Unnamed Child |
Nothing definite is said in "Smoke" about the "child" in Battenburg who was run down by the man hired to kill Judge Dunkenfield (31), but based on the fact that narrator doesn't specify race and the aggressive reaction of the people who arrest the driver, this child was presumably white. |
|
2075 | Unnamed Grand Jury Foreman 1 |
The foreman of the grand jury in "Smoke" listens to, objects to, but ultimately pays heed to county attorney Gavin Steven’s conjectures. |
|
2076 | Unnamed Hill Folk 1 |
When Young Anse moves "back into the hills" in "Smoke," the “neighbors and strangers” in that most rural part of Yoknapatawpha leave him "severely alone" (6). |
|
2077 | Unnamed Hill Folk 2 |
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). |
|
2078 | Unnamed Hitman |
The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary. |
|
2079 | Unnamed Jurors 2 |
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. |
|
2080 | Unnamed Negro Witness 1 |
This man in "Smoke" - referred to only as "a Negro" - tells the authorities about seeing Old Anse "digging up the graves in the cedar grove where five generations of his wife’s people rested" (9). |
|
2081 | Unnamed Negro Witness 2 |
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). |
|
2082 | Unnamed People of Battenburg |
Referred to in "Smoke" only as "they" (31), these people in Battenburg who seize the Memphis hitman after he runs down a child. |
|
2083 | Unnamed Tenant Farmers 1 |
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. |
|
2084 | Mr. West |
In "Smoke" the man who owns and runs the Jefferson drug store is named West. He is instrumental in providing county attorney Gavin Stevens with information concerning the stranger with the taste for "city cigarettes" (28). |
|
2085 | Jim Gant |
"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. |
|
2086 | Mrs. Gant |
Mrs. Gant is probably the most powerfully drawn character in the story named after her daughter, "Miss Zilphia Gant," just as she is an overwhelming force in Zilphia's life, even long after she is dead. |
|
2087 | Zilphia Gant |
"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). |
|
2088 | Unnamed Customer of Mrs. Gant |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "client of Mrs. Gant's" in the dressmaking shop arouses the dressmaker's wrath when she starts talking to the nine-year-old Zilphia about going to school: "You'll like it," she says, before being chased away by Mrs. Gant (372). It is presumably this woman who reports the situation to the county authorities - according to the townspeople, at least, it was "a client . . . that got Zilphia in school" (372). |
|
2089 | Unnamed Daughter of Zilphia's Friend |
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. |
|
2090 | Unnamed Private Detectives |
When "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns that her former husband has married again "in a neighboring state," she travels to Memphis to engage a "private detective agency" to surveil him and his new wife. The story does not describe any of the individual detectives, but the agency sends her detailed accounts in weekly letters. (The history of American private detective agencies dates back to Allen Pinkerton, who started his National Detective Agency in 1850.) |
|
2091 | Unnamed Half-Witted Boy |
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). |
|
2092 | Unnamed Daughter of Zilphia |
Years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant in "Miss Zilphia Gant," Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). In many of these dreams she is "walking to and from school . . . with her daughter's hand in hers" (380). |
|
2093 | Little Zilphia |
"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). |
|
2094 | Unnamed Jefferson Neighbor |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "neighbor" is awakened when Zilphia "runs out of the house in her nightdress, screaming" (380). She - although the neighbor could be a man or a woman - summons the doctor. |
|
2095 | Unnamed Man at Vinson's Tavern |
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). |
|
2096 | Unnamed Men at Vinson's Tavern |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the other men who frequent the tavern where Gant stays on his trips to Memphis are described as "rough, unshaven, overalled men" who "eat coarse food and drink pale, virulent corn whiskey and sleep in their muddy clothes and boots on the puncheon floor before the log fire" (368). Some of them, at least, are probably mule or horse traders like Gant - they arrive in "other caravans similar to his" - but others make their living in "more equivocal" but unspecified ways (368). |
|
2097 | Unnamed Negro Men in Dreams |
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). |
|
2098 | Unnamed Neighbor in the Bend 1 |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," Mrs. Gant asks a "neighbor" woman to "keep" Zilphia for her while she leaves to take revenge on her husband (369). This woman is never described. |
|
2099 | Unnamed Neighbor in the Bend 2 |
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. |
|
2100 | Unnamed Father of Boy in Car |
In Light in August this father is hoping to get the reward for Joe Christmas' capture when he brings his son to town to tell the sheriff about giving the fugitive a ride on the night of the killing. |
|
2101 | Unnamed Girl in Car |
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. |
|
2102 | Unnamed Crowd at Burden Place |
The crowd outside the Burden house in Light in August is, like so many crowds in the fictions, an audience in search of sensations. Although the white people of Yoknapatawpha had avoided Joanna's place for decades, within minutes after her corpse is discovered in the burning house a huge crowd gathers there. It is comprised mostly of white men (who, the narrator pointedly says, "would not have allowed their wives" to call on Joanna while she lived there, 291-92), although the crowd includes "the women" too (289). |
|
2103 | Unnamed Delinquent Girls |
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). |
|
2104 | Unnamed Deputies |
In Light in August "five or six deputies" from Jefferson and Mottstown help the sheriffs of these towns escort Joe from the jail in Mottstown to the car that will take him to Jefferson (356). |
|
2105 | Unnamed Elders at the Seminary |
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). |
|
2106 | Unnamed Folks in Mexico |
These "folks" appear in Light in August only at second hand, when the man who tells Nathaniel Burden's family in Missouri about him mentions the trouble he got into in Mexico for killing a man who called him a horse thief. According to the messenger, "folks claim it wasn't the Mexican's horse noways," because, they say, the Mexican "never owned no horse" (244). It's not made clear whether these "folks" are Mexicans too, or as seems more likely are among the "Easterners" who have recently come west (244). |
|
2107 | Unnamed Four Boys |
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). |
|
2108 | Unnamed Furniture Repairer and Dealer |
This man "from the eastern part of the state" narrates the last chapter of Light in August, telling his wife the story of his encounter with Lena and Byron during his trip to Tennessee (494). He and his wife are in bed, and both seem comfortable with each other and with sex. |
|
2109 | Unnamed Furniture Repairer and Dealer's Wife |
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. |
|
2110 | Unnamed Girl in Arkansas |
This is the "girl that lived about six miles away" from the Hineses in Light in August at whose house Milly says she will be spending the night (375). Since that is the ruse that allows her to ride off with the circus worker, the girl may not actually exist. |
|
2111 | Unnamed Group of Negroes 2 |
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. |
|
2112 | Unnamed Jefferson Driver |
This is "the man behind the wheel" of the car in which Christmas is driven from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August; he keeps the engine running while the officers go into the jail to get him (356). |
|
2113 | Unnamed Jefferson Townsman |
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). |
|
2114 | Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 2 |
This entry supplements the "Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople" entry. It is necessary because, in addition to the major role that the white population as an aggregate plays in Light in August, the narrative identifies a number of behaviors specifically with the town's population of white males. |
|
2115 | Unnamed Jefferson Woman in Memphis |
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. |
|
2116 | Unnamed Johns in Southern Brothels |
These men in Light in August are the white customers of various unspecified brothels "in the (comparatively speaking) south" (225) who beat Christmas when, after "bedding" one of the white prostitutes, he identifies himself as a Negro (224). |
|
2117 | Unnamed Kansas Preacher |
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). |
|
2118 | Unnamed Ladies in Hightower's Congregation |
These women in Light in August observe and talk about the conduct and behavior of other women. At church on Sundays, they talk quietly and nod "to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle" (366). When the Hightowers arrive, they watch and worry about Mrs. Hightower; they bring food to the Reverend when she goes to a sanitorium. |
|
2119 | Unnamed Lawyer 3 |
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). |
|
2120 | Unnamed Sexual Partner of Mrs. Hightower |
The man whom Mrs. Hightower meets in a Memphis hotel in Light in August is drunk when he registers under a fictitious name as her husband. It is not clear if she had ever met him on any of her earlier trips to Memphis, nor what role he might have played in her death there, but the narrative says that "he was arrested" (67). |
|
2121 | Unnamed Man at Max's |
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. |
|
2122 | Unnamed Man Killed by Calvin Burden |
All Light in August says about this man is that he was killed in St. Louis by Calvin Burden I "in an argument about slavery" (242) - though since Calvin is a fierce abolitionist, we can assume this man is pro-slavery. |
|
2123 | Unnamed Man Who Finds Hightower |
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). |
|
2124 | Unnamed Man with Candy |
This is the man in Light in August who sells Joe Christmas the "stale and flyspecked box of candy" he had won "for ten cents on a punching board in a store" (191). |
|
2125 | Unnamed Matron of Memphis Orphanage |
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. |
|
2126 | Unnamed Member of the Posse |
When the men chasing Christmas in Light in August are led by the dogs to the Negro woman "wearing a pair of man's shoes," one "member of the posse" identifies the shoes as the fugitive's (329). |
|
2127 | Unnamed Jurors 3 |
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 . . . |
|
2128 | Unnamed Members of Hightower's Congregation |
In Light in August the old men and women, pillars of the church, are among the first to "astonished and dubious" about Reverend Hightower's obsessions (61). Others increasingly view his behavior and preaching with suspicion, and gossip about him and his wife - though they also raise funds to pay for Mrs. Hightower's treatment in a sanatorium and cook meals for him during her absence. |
|
2129 | Unnamed Members of Other Congregations |
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. |
|
2130 | Unnamed Memphis Reporters |
On the "Sunday morning" after Mrs. Hightower's scandalous death in Light in August, Hightower's church is beset by swarm of "Memphis reporters taking pictures" (67). They even "follow him into the church" (68). |
|
2131 | Unnamed Men at Farm House |
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). |
|
2132 | Unnamed Men at Varner's Store 3 |
The group of men at Varner's store in Light in August are there on Saturday morning to watch as the pregnant Lena Grove descends from Armstid's wagon. They are described as "squatting" and "already spitting across the heelgnawed porch" (25). They "listen quietly" as the tells her story, and are all sure she will never again see the father of the child she carries (26). |
|
2133 | Unnamed Men in Max's Restaurant |
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). |
|
2134 | Unnamed Men Who Chase Christmas |
After Joe Christmas escapes from the deputy outside the courthouse, his pursuers include "three men" in a car. They follow Christmas and Grimm into Hightower's house and watch as Grimm castrates Christmas. One of them vomits at the sight. The narrator of Light in August says that these men "are not to lose it," will never be able to forget what they saw (465). |
|
2135 | Unnamed Mexican Man |
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). |
|
2136 | Unnamed Ministers at the Seminary |
The men who are Hightower's teachers at the seminary in Light in August are also Presbyterian ministers. Hightower's decision to marry is based in part on the fact that "most of the faculty were married" (480). |
|
2137 | Unnamed Moonshine Buyers 1 |
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). |
|
2138 | Unnamed Cafe Employee in Mottstown |
At the "little cafe down by the depot" in Mottstown in Light in August, this "cafe man" serves dinner to Doc and Mrs. Hines and suggests they hire a car to take them to Jefferson rather than wait for the train (359). |
|
2139 | Unnamed Negro "Pappy" |
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.' |
|
2140 | Unnamed Negro Bootblack in Mottstown |
In Light in August this bootblack works in the Mottstown barber shop where Christmas gets a shave. The barbershop is identified as "a white barbership," but in that context the adjective refers to the patrons it serves (349). The race of the bootblack is not specified, but since the job he performs, shining shoes, is typically done in Faulkner's fiction by blacks, we have identified his race as "Black." This bootblack notices that Joe is wearing "second hand brogans that are too big for him" (349). |
|
2141 | Unnamed Negro Child 4 |
The posse chasing Christmas in Light in August finds this child, "stark naked" and "sitting in the cold ashes on the hearth" beside his mother, when they kick open the door to her cabin (329). There is no indication of the child's gender. |