Character Keys

In The Hamlet this Memphis wholesaler provides Ratliff with his sewing machines.

Many if not most of the farmers in Frenchman's Bend are tenants of Will Varner, working land he owns as sharecroppers. This particular cropper only appears in The Hamlet in the phrase describing the woman with whom Will Varner is having an affair as the "wife of one of his own tenants" (156).

At Mink Snopes' wedding in The Hamlet, these "two passing men" - men who happen to be walking past the office of the Justice of the Peace - are called in to witness the ceremony (264).

The Hamlet looks over three decades into the future to describe the eventual end of Jody Varner's invisible bachelorhood in rather stark, but grammatically conditional terms: when Jody turns "sixty five," he "would be caught and married by a creature not yet seventeen probably, who would for the rest of her life continue to take revenge upon him for her whole sex" (352).

The people whom Sam Fathers calls "the People" and whom the story's title refers to as "The Old People" are the Chickasaw Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the white settlers arrived in the 1830s. As a tribe they have disappeared from the land, but a cherished part of the narrator's apprenticeship to Sam consists of the stories the old man tells him about this "race," whom neither of them "had ever known" but who survive in the traditions that Sam passes on (204).

As Joseph Blotner points out, in a typescript for "The Old People" the father of the story's narrator is referred to as "Mr Compson" (presumably the Mr. Compson who is Benjy, Caddy, Quentin and Jason's father), but the character is given no name at all in this magazine version of the story. All we can say with certainty about him is that he belongs to Yoknapatawpha's upper-class, owns a farm four miles from Jefferson and has an office in town. He goes hunting every November with Major de Spain, Walter Ewell, Boon Hogganbeck and Uncle Ike McCaslin.

Mentioned but not named in "The Old People," the great-grandfather of the narrator was presumably one of the original planters in Yoknapatawpha, a contemporary of the first Sartorises and Compsons, but all the story definitely says about him is that "almost a hundred years ago" he bought the slaves from whom Sam Fathers is descended from Ikkemotubbe (203).

In "The Old People" and again in Go Down, Moses, this group of Negro hunters see "the sudden burst of flame" as Jobaker's hut burns down (204, 164). In the short story they are explicitly described as "possum-hunting" (204); in the novel they are just "hunting" (164).

Jackson Fentry is farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," refuses to acquit the Bookwright, who has shot and killed Buck Thorpe for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter. It is discovered that to Fentry, Buck is the son he adopted from a young but dying poor-white woman to whom decades earlier he took in and married just before she died. The son was taken from him at three years of age, to grow up (badly) as a Thorpe, but to him the murdered man is still "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" (100).

In "Tomorrow" this woman appears in Frenchman's Bend a week after Thorpe was shot, "claiming to be Thorpe's wife" (90), and hoping he left some property. Though she has "a wedding license to prove it" (90), the narrator sounds suspicious about her marriage.

"Them two brothers" - as Mrs. Pruit calls them in "Tomorrow" - are "black-complected" like their sister (105). They feel sorry for Fentry when they arrive to claim that sister's child, now three years old, and give Fentry a "money purse" to compensate him for the loss (106). He flings it away.

The biological father of Buck Thorpe in "Tomorrow" is an exceptionally illusive figure. Both "Miss Smith" and her brothers, the Thorpes, state that she was married when she arrived in Frenchman's Bend, eight months pregnant. If so, it's never made clear why she leaves her husband. All her "oldest brother" tells Isham Quick is that they "done already attended to" him (106). What he did as her husband, however, or if he was in fact her husband, or what they did to or for him - these questions remain unanswered.

Only referred to in "Tomorrow," this is the rancher who "promptly identifies" the stolen cattle Buck Thorpe is driving along the road to Memphis (90).

Like her daughter-in-law in "Tomorrow," this Mrs. Fentry died before she was forty. According to Pruitt, it was "that place," the poor Fentry farm on which they lived and the impoverished life they led there, that killed both women at such a young age (96).

The local midwife in "Tomorrow" who delivers the child that grows up to be Buck Thorpe knows that his mother was too ill to "get up from that mattress" (105).

All that the readers of "Tomorrow" learn about Mrs. G.A. Fentry is that, like her mother-in-law before her, she died before she was forty. According to Pruitt, it was "that place," the poor Fentry farm on which she lived and the impoverished life she led there, that killed her (96).

In both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

These advertisers - presumably local businessmen and professionals - appear only hypothetically in "Go Down, Moses," when Mr. Wilmoth, the editor of the Jefferson paper, worries whether he'll lose "what few advertisers I have got" (262) for helping Stevens organize a funeral for a black man, Samuel Beauchamp.

Pearson is the "state draft investigator" in "The Tall Men" (45). A man of "better than average intelligence," he has developed an arrogant, stereotypical way of thinking about country people (48). His previous relief agency work has taught him to expect the worst from such groups, but his encounter with Mr. Gombault and the McCallum family is "different from what he had expected" (48). Over the course of the story, he learns how wrong his assumptions can be.

After serving in the Civil War's western theater, the Union general Philip Sheridan came east when Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to command the cavalry forces in the Army of the Potomac. What Gumbault tells Pearson in "The Tall Men" about how "Sheridan's calvary blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley" at the very end of the war is accurate (54).

While waiting on Dr. Schofield to amputate his leg in "The Tall Men," Buddy McCallum recalls another doctor and a more unbearable wait during the First World War. He remembers, "It took a long time for the doctor to get around to all of us, and by that time it was hurting bad." Presumably American and most certainly overworked, this doctor patiently treats the "heap" of injured soldiers "racked up along a bank outside a field dressing station" (51).

The memory of Mr. Pearson's unnamed grandfather is the first point in "The Tall Men" where he begins to identify with the McCallum family. When Pearson enters the bedroom where the injured Buddy McCallum lies, he sees beside Buddy's bedside a "big, old-fashioned, wicker-covered demijohn" like the one in which his grandfather kept his own whiskey (49).

When deciding if he can safely amputate Buddy McCallum's leg in "The Tall Men," Dr. Schofield realizes that to anesthetize his patient, "I'll need my nurse to help me" (51). The nurse in question is never sent for, though the operation is performed.

As Gombault notes in "The Tall Men," as the last military act of the Civil War "Sheridan's cavalry" blocked the road from "Appomattox to the [Shenandoah] Valley" in April, 1865, forcing Lee to surrender (54).

The boy narrator of "Two Soldiers" calls him "the Law" (89). The employee at the bus depot calls him "Mr. Foote" (89). He's probably the night marshal in Jefferson. He finds the boy alone at dawn in the empty town square, takes him to the depot, and turns him over to the town's informal social service system - "two ladies in fur coats" (90).

In "Two Soldiers" the "General MacArthur" who was "holding" the Japanese invaders at bay in the Philipines in the nightly radio reports that the narrator and Pete listen to (82) was General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Army Forces in the Far East when the U.S. entered World War II. After the Japanese invasion forced him to withdraw from the Philippines, he spoke the parting words - "I shall return" - that were becoming famous at the time "Two Soldiers" was written.

At the McKellogg residence in "Two Soldiers," the Grier boy meets Colonel McKellogg: "a old feller, with a britching strop, too, and a silver-colored bird on each shoulder" (98). The 'birds' are in fact actually made of silver, the insignia of his rank.

Franklin Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, re-elected to four terms in between 1932 and his death in 1945. He is mentioned in three later texts. In "Two Soldiers" he appears only in Res Grier's reference to "Our President in Washington, D.C." (85). He is included in a list of contemporary political figures in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses - but curiously isn't on the similar list in the earlier magazine version of "Delta Autumn" (322).

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" mentions that "the feller wound the door shut and the bus began to hum" (87). He is referring to the driver of the bus that his brother, Pete, is taking to Jefferson on the first leg of his journey to enlist in the U.S. Army.

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" is amazed at the number of people he sees in Memphis: the "folks from ever'where" and the "rushing cars and shoving folks" are clearly the most people that he has ever seen (93).

These "Japanese" should be understood to be 'the enemy' that the U.S. in fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two. The young narrator of "Two Soldiers" as well as his mother refer to the people who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84). In the later story "Shall Not Perish," the same narrator, a year older, refers to the country's enemy and the forces responsible for his brother's death as "them Japs" (101).

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" notes that "more folks" arrive at the Jefferson bus depot and buy tickets for the bus to Memphis that he is waiting to take (92).

The younger of two Jefferson women in "Two Soldiers" who take charge of the young Grier boy and help him get to Memphis. She may simply be a concerned member of the community (the "fur coat" she wears suggests a lady rather than a public employee, 91) but she does carry a "hand satchel" with papers in it, and tells the boy "we must have a case history for our files" (91).

In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90).

Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.

"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames. In "Delta Autumn," Don Boyd uses them to suggest how widespread are the contemporary political threats to the U.S. (269). In the revised version of the story that appears in Go Down, Moses, the character who mentions them is Roth Edmonds (322).

"Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses describe the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians who lived there until the 19th century (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it. (See also the entry for Unnamed First Aboriginal in the index.)

All we know about the father of the young woman who has given birth to Don Boyd's child in "Delta Autumn" is that he lived in Indianapolis and died "two years ago" (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses he made the young woman's family part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, and so although he made no changes in the way this father is described, radically re-positioned him in the larger Yoknapatawpha narrative; for that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.)

In "Delta Autumn," this woman, Ike McCaslin's "dead wife's niece," lives in his house in Jefferson with her children and looks after him during the fifty weeks of the year he is not in the woods (274). In Go Down, Moses this same woman is called his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), but in the first mention of her, in the very beginning of the novel, she is "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" (6). Faulkner either mis-remembered the story when he wrote "sister" or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" later.

In both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the texts briefly mention the Indians who once inhabited Mississippi. As the "successors" of the aboriginal inhabitants, they turned the aboriginals' raised refuges from the water into burial mounds, which suggests their inevitable historical fate: all that is left of these Indians in the present are their words as the names of "the little towns" along the river (271, 325).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339).

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses briefly trace the process by which several generations of planters, the white men who own the land, turned the wilderness into fields, using the labor of "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and "hired labor" ever since (270, 323).

John Keats, the author of the poem quoted in both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years.

Turner Ashby led a cavalry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. The historical event Cass refers to in Go Down, Moses - how "by chance" Turner Ashby lost and the Union army found "Lee's battle-order" for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion of the North in 1862 - is a famous piece of Civil War history; the order itself, Special Order 191, is often referred to as the 'Lost Dispatch' or the 'Lost Order' (272). Ashby himself was killed in combat in 1862.

Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294).

The full name of Ike McCaslin's "Uncle Hubert" in Go Down, Moses, as readers learn when he signs the i.o.u.'s he leaves his nephew instead of a golden treasure, is Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp. The son of the man who built it, he owns the "Warwick" plantation that is half-a-day’s ride from the McCaslin plantation. After the Civil War he takes a black mistress for a while, and then lives with an aged black servant "in one single room" in the decaying mansion (290) until it burns down.

Daisy is mentioned in Go Down, Moses by Major de Spain when he tells Ike that Ash would be glad to go into the woods, "where he won't have to eat Daisy's cooking" (301). It seems clear that like Ash, Daisy works for the Major as a cook, and it becomes likely that she is Ash's wife when De Spain adds "complain about it" - her cooking - "anyway" (301).

In the 4th section of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, during his long conversation with his cousin Cass about the history of the world with particular reference to the Old and New South and Ike's own belief that he must relinquish his inheritance from the past, Ike has a lot to say about God - as both the author of the Bible and the providential force behind human events. Ike most frequently refers to this divinity as "He," always capitalizing the H (243, etc).

In Go Down, Moses Hulett works for the Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse, whom Roth Edmonds and Mollie Beauchamp visit regarding a petition for divorce for the Beauchamps. He makes several sharp remarks concerning racial decorum and Lucas’s "uppity" failure to observe it (124).