Character Keys

While telling Judge Allison whom he might expect to meet in other parts of Beyond, Mothershed mentions "the one that wrote the little women books. If he ain't there, he ought to be" (788). The book titled 'Little Women' was of course not written by a man, and the story doesn't give any further information about either the books or the person Mothershed is thinking of. One possibility is Edward Stratemeyer (1863-1930), who wrote books under pseudonyms for boys as well as girls, but there's no way to say if Faulkner is even thinking about an actual children's book author.

The people at the Judge's funeral in "Beyond" are not directly mentioned, but their presence can be presumed by the reference to "the line of motor cars at his gate" (797).

These "other children" in "Beyond" are the ones who gave the young mother's son the scars he bears "one day when they were playing" (794). It isn't clear if this happened in a previous life, or in Beyond, but what the mother says - "they didn't know they were going to hurt him" (794) - adds to the details in the story that suggest a connection between this anonymous mother and son and Mary and Jesus in the New Testament.

During his childhood, as Judge Allison describes it in "Beyond," these "two house servants" (790) would supervise his infrequent trips to play outside barefoot in the garden.

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He assumes that the Judge is looking for his own wife, and he sympathizes with him because "It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you" (784).

In "Wash," this "half-grown white boy" finds the body of Thomas Sutpen lying outside the tumble-down fishing camp. After "a mesmerized instant" in which he looks at Wash looking at him through a window in the camp, he runs off to report the crime (546). Although Faulkner omits his race (and a hyphen) when he returns to this "halfgrown boy" in Absalom!, he does add a couple of aural details to make the event more dramatic: the boy is "whistling" when he first sees the body, and he "screams" when he sees "Wash in the window, watching him" (229).

These are the enslaved people in "Wash" who call Wash "white trash behind his back" (536), and to his face pointedly ask him "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). When they do that, Wash can see their "white eyes and teeth behind which derision lurked" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).

There is a lot that "Elly" never explains about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209).

Philip is "a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits" who courts the title character of "Elly" with clock-like regularity (213). As a Jefferson boy whom she has known "from childhood," Philip is the epitome of a suitable husband for Elly (213). His draw as a suitor is indicated in the same breath as his current occupation: "an assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day" (213).

Although "Elly" begins and ends on the road between Jefferson and Mills City, the only other drivers mentioned in the story are referred to, obliquely, at the very end, after the accident, when Elly thinks, "They won't even stop to see if I am hurt" (224). Their presence is indicated only by the "snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel" that she hears on the road above her (223).

Elly's grandmother - Elly's father's mother - lives in Elly's family's home in Jefferson, though she is formerly of Louisiana. Her given name is Ailanthia, as is that of the granddaughter after whom "Elly" is titled. Elly's grandmother is frequently described as cold: "cold, piercing" (209), with "that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf," having lost her hearing 15 years before the story takes place (212). The narrator calls her an "old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped" (223).

Elly's mother lives with her, her husband and especially her mother-in-law in a "biggish house" in Jefferson (208). She is a negligible figure in her daughter's life, though it is her suggestion that Elly drive to Mills City to pick up that mother-in-law that precipitates the story's violent climax.

Elly's unnamed friend entertains Paul de Montigny in her home, but is quick to judge Elly for the latter's interest in him. Elly's friend smokes, furtively, in her home, presumably hoping to escape detection by her parents. But if she too is rebellious, it is within very fixed limits. When Elly defends her behavior with Paul by reminding this girl that "you invited him into your house," she replies "I wasn't hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though" (210). And despite entertaining Paul, she takes the signs of his mixed racial identity as proof of Elly's "queer taste" (209).

According to a story that Elly's friend "just heard," Paul de Montigny has an uncle who "killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209). In the friend's mind, this story 'proves' that Paul himself is black, but while believing in 'black blood' as a kind of curse tells us something about the friend and the culture she grew up in, "Elly" does not allow us to say whether Paul even has an uncle, much less whether any of the friend's other assumptions and implications are true.

While talking to Philip in "Elly," Elly invents this "party" of people she will be visiting in order to explain her forthcoming absence - and her need for his silent cooperation. She says that the group she'll be with is comprised of "people you don't know and that I don't expect to see again before I am married" (215).

In "Elly" the various men whom the title character kisses in the shadows on her veranda are described as "youths and young men of the town at first, but later . . . almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent" (208).

In "A Bear Hunt" Bonds is a "dead and forgotten contemporary" of Luke Provine when he was a young man. According to the narrator, it has been "years now" since Bonds, along with Luke and Luke's unnamed brother, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64).

Mr. Fraser is the "childless widower" who takes Monk in after his grandmother's death and teaches him how to make whiskey as well as he made it himself (45). They live together for ten years, until Fraser's death. The narrator of "Monk" speculates that "it was probably Fraser who gave [Monk his] name," and the citizens of "the county got to know [Monk] or become familiar with him, at least" through his association with Fraser (45).

The unnamed children of Lucius Provine. The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" makes only one direct reference to them, saying their father "makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64).

This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator of "A Bear Hunt" as "scurrying and screaming" when, some twenty years earlier, the Provine gang would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).

One of the boys in town who, "on a dare," joins the unnamed narrator of "A Bear Hunt" when he was fifteen to spend a night on the Indian mound (66). During and afterwards, they do not speak about their experience, apparently awed by it; the narrator says even though they were children, "yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were - or should have been - beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear" (66).

These black men in "A Bear Hunt" were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash.

In "A Bear Hunt" these "town officers" must be local law enforcement officials who, less than a week after Luke Provine appears in town carrying a black sample case, discover that what he is selling is bootleg whisky, a serious crime in Yoknapatawpha, which like the rest of Mississippi prohibited the sale of alcohol - not only during, but also before and after Prohibition (64). (Mississippi did not legalize liquor until the 1960s.) The story suggests they arrest Provine for his crime, but allow Major de Spain to "extricate" him from the charge (64).

Mannie Hait first appears in "Mule in the Yard," and then returns in her role as widow and adversary of mules and I.O. Snopes when Faulkner re-tells the story in The Town. In both texts she staunchly defends her house against both adversaries, but is defeated by her own carelessness. In the end, however, despite the loss of her house, she manages to get even with one mule and one Snopes.

Along with the cashier who works for him, this banker in "Mule in the Yard" tries to convince Mannie Hait to invest her settlement money in bonds or a savings or a checking account. (When Faulkner re-tells this event in The Town, the president of the bank is "Major de Spain himself," 244.)

In "Mule in the Yard," these "farmers and widows and orphans black and white" (252) buy mules from I.O. Snopes.

The narrator of "Mule in the Yard" singles out from 'the town' as a group this one "town wag" who sends I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule, his wry commentary on all the mules that Snopes loses in "accidents" with freight trains on the "blind curve" on the railroad tracks (252).

In Requiem for a Nun the carpetbagger named Redmond associates himself with this general, "the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson" (183). (Historically, the Union forces who burned (but did not occupy) Oxford in 1863 were under the command of General Andrew Jackson Smith, who is mentioned as "General Smith" in other Yoknapatawpha fictions.)

In "Vendee" Bayard says that the livestock pen at Ab Snopes' cabin was "just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home" (100). The reference to Yance is puzzling, since no character with that name is ever mentioned anywhere else in the fictions, and other Unvanquished stories describe in detail how Bayard, Ringo, Joby and Loosh build that pen at Sartoris. Faulkner might just have forgotten Joby's name: when he reprinted this story as a chapter in The Unvanquished, he changed the name "Yance" to "Joby."

In "That Will Be Fine," Emmeline is the nursemaid for Aunt Louisa's baby. She takes Mandy's place in cooking breakfast, complaining "that she was going to waste all her Christmas doing extra work they never had the sense she give them credit for and that this looked like to her it was a good house to be away from nohow" (279).

In "That Will Be Fine," Aunt Louisa is married to Uncle Fred and mother to Louisa, Fred, and an unnamed baby. As Rodney's older sister, she repeatedly rationalizes her brother's behavior. She hides his misdoings from their father, and pleads for Mr. Pruitt to give him time to get the two thousand dollars he needs to cover his theft from the Compress Association.

In "That Will Be Fine," the narrator's cousin Louisa is the young daughter of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

Georgie, the seven-year-old narrator of "That Will Be Fine," tells the essentially sordid and ultimately fatal story of his uncle Rodney from a perspective that emphasizes both the ignorance and self-centeredness of childhood. He never questions or recognizes Rodney's various forms of social and criminal misbehavior, and his loyalty to Rodney has its roots less in family love than in greed.

In "That Will Be Fine," Grandma is married to Grandpa and is mother to Aunt Louisa, Sarah, and Uncle Rodney. She is Georgie's maternal grandmother, but Georgie pays little attention to her.

The "Uncle Rodney" (266) of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is the youngest of three children. He is also guilty of theft, fraud, and embezzlement. He is also a serial philanderer. Rodney manages the latter "business" by manipulating his nephew, Georgie, with promises of future monetary rewards. "By God," he tells Georgie, "some day you will be as good a businessman as I am" (280). His attempted elopement with a married woman on Christmas Eve goes horribly wrong, and Rodney winds up "wrapped in a quilt" and carried back to his family like a "side of beef" (286).

Mandy cooks for Grandpa in "That Will Be Fine," but she seems to have disappeared the day before Christmas, missing her duties as cook and leaving her cabin mysteriously "locked on the inside" (274).

Rosie, a servant working for the family of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine," seems to have a clear understanding of her employers' characters. In particular, she chastises young Georgie: "You and money! If you ain't rich time you twenty-one, hit will be because the law done abolished money or done abolished you" (265). Rosie, like Emmeline, has to do some of the cooking due to the absence of Grandma and Grandpa's servant, Mandy. Although she grumbles about her work, she performs it conscientiously.

In "That Will Be Fine," Mrs. Tucker is one of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquests, the married woman with whom he had an affair while visiting town "last summer" (266). One one occasion, Mrs. Tucker is "sick," so Georgie doesn't get a quarter for his part in the "business" (285).

After Rodney's death, which the young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is still ignorant of, he sees these "ladies with shawls over their heads" coming to offer their condolences to the family.

In "That Will Be Fine," these two men prevent Georgie from seeing his uncle's corpse. One of them picks up Georgie and carries him away. This man has a sense of irony worthy of Faulkner himself. When Georgie naively asks if the "wrapped bundle" that other men are carrying (Rodney's corpse, "wrapped in a quilt" and laid on a shutter) is "a Christmas present for Grandpa," this man replies yes, "From all the husbands in Mottstown" (286).

Georgie, the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls his father "Papa," but his actual name is also George. He is "in the livery-stable business" (268), and has no illusions about the dynamics of his wife's family or the character of its black sheep, his wife's brother Rodney. When his wife's sister Louisa, for example, rationalizes Rodney's promiscuous behavior by pointing to his lack of opportunities "to meet a nice girl and marry her," George says: "Marry? Rodney marry?

Since his store is on or near the street in Jefferson that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Nigger Row," it's possible that Sonny Barger is black, but more likely that he is one of Jefferson's white small businessmen who cater to poor people of both races - like Willy in his drugstore (234). The fact that Barger sells the narrator a bottle of "Jamaica ginger" - a legal form of alcohol - suggests a seedy kind of establishment (234).

In "Uncle Willy" Miss Callaghan is the narrator's teacher, at least for "one year" (228).

"Mrs. Christian" (the narrator of "Uncle Willy" gives her no other name) is a prostitute in Memphis whom Willy marries on one of his regular trips to the city, and an affront to most of Jefferson when he brings her back to his house. She is "twice as big as Uncle Willy," and visually conspicuous in her clothes - "a red hat and a pink dress" (236), "a red-and-white striped dress so that she looked like a great big stick of candy" (237), "a black lace dress" (238).

Mrs. Merridew is the character whom the juvenile narrator of "Uncle Willy" casts as the story's main antagonist: when he accuses Job of telephoning "Her" about Willy's whereabouts, both he and Job know he means Mrs. Merridew (246). She is a member of Reverend Schultz's church and the determined leader of the crusade to "save" Uncle Willy from his predilections, which she sees as both beastly and sinful (238).

The man whom the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Uncle Robert" (239) is presumably his biological uncle, the brother of his "Papa" or "Mamma" - although given the other "Uncle" in the story (i.e. Willy, who is not related to the narrator), and the way Southern culture often uses the term ceremonially with white as well as black men, it's hard to be certain of that.

"Sister Schultz" in "Uncle Willy" is probably Reverend Schultz' wife (229). Like "Brother Schultz" and "Brother Miller" (229, 227), the title "Sister" most likely is a ceremonial title, indicating their fellowship as members of the same church.

At the beginning of "Uncle Willy" the narrator identifies "the good women in Jefferson" as the people who are to blame for "driving Uncle Willy out of town," and thus for the narrator's own choice to follow him (225). The crusade against Willy's behavior is led by two particular women, Mrs. Merridew and Mrs. Hovis, yet at points the narrative seems to see the town's "good women" and the town's 'white' women as essentially synonymous.

"Papa," as the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls his father, is a "lawyer" (236). Although he does not share any of the self-righteousness of the women who want to save Willy from his vices, he does participate in Mrs. Merridew's campaign to force Willy's wife to leave town, and in Job's attempt to keep Willy from flying his airplane. He calls Willy a "lunatic" (239) and blames the old man for the narrator's various forms of truancy; the narrator himself repeatedly rejects both those interpretations.