Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
3047 | Salmon |
Salmon is the owner of a garage in Mottstown in Light in August. He offers to rent a car to Doc and Mrs. Hines for three dollars but also tells them they can take the train "for fiftytwo cents apiece" (358). |
|
3048 | Simms |
In Light in August Simms may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill. |
|
3049 | Pappy Thompson |
In Light in August he is the seventy-year-old deacon of an Negro church in Yoknapatawpha whom Joe Christmas knocks down in the middle of a service. |
|
3050 | Roz Thompson |
In Light in August Roz is the grandson of Pappy Thompson; he is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull. |
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3051 | Thompson, Daughter of Pappy |
This woman - referred to only as "Pappy Thompson's daughter" and the mother of Roz - does not appear in Light in August herself (323). |
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3052 | Deacon Vines |
An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324). |
|
3053 | Hamp Waller |
Identified in Light in August as a "countryman" - i.e. a farmer from the county of Yoknapatawpha not the town of Jefferson (90) - Hamp Waller is the first person on the scene of Joanna's murder. Riding to town in a wagon with his family, he finds Joe Brown in the burning house. He also goes inside the house, where he finds Joanna Burden's body and brings it outside. |
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3054 | Mrs. Hamp Waller |
In Light in August Mrs. Waller reports the fire at the Burden place to the sheriff after she and her husband discover the burning house and Joanna's murdered body. |
|
3055 | Unnamed John with Bobbie |
This "man" never quite appears in Light in August. One night, when Joe goes to Max's looking for Bobbie, he gets as far as her window and somehow "knows that there was a man in the room with her" (198). If he is there, the man must be one of her johns, the men who pay her for sex. |
|
3056 | Unnamed Male Relatives of Girl in Car |
In her "terror and . . . ratlike desperation," the girl riding in the car that Christmas flags down in Light in August tries to defend herself against him with the threat of her "pappy and brothers" who live "right up yonder!" (285). She seems too frightened to be making them up. |
|
3057 | Unnamed Someone 1 |
This is the person in Light in August who, sometime after Grimm fires the shots that kill Christmas, covers the five gunshot holes in his body "with a folded handkerchief" (464). It seems safe to say that this "someone" is a man, but not even that is explicitly said. |
|
3058 | Unnamed Spanish Authorities in Mexico |
The messenger in Light in August who tells Nathaniel Burden’s family about the "trouble" he got into in Mexico refers to the Mexicans as "them Spanish" and alludes to their animus against “white men” (244). He obviously thinks of Hispanic/Spanish as non-white, but our database follows the practice of identifying both Hispanic and Spanish racially as 'white.' |
|
3059 | Unnamed Third Man |
In Light in August, when Sheriff Kennedy and Deputy Buford go into the cabin at the Burden place to interrogate the black man that Buford and "two or three others" have seized (291), this "third man" is there too (293). The interrogation consists mainly of Buford whipping the Negro until he tells Kennedy what he wanted to know: who had been living there before. |
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3060 | Unnamed American Legion Commander |
In Light in August, when Grimm asks the "commander of the local Post" about organizing a group to preserve the peace in Jefferson after Christmas is arrested, this man says no. "I couldn't use the Post like that. After all, we are not soldiers now" (452). |
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3061 | Unnamed American Legion Member 1 |
In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man objects to Grimm's rhetoric and argues that this "is Jefferson's trouble, not Washington's" (454). |
|
3062 | Unnamed American Legion Member 2 |
In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man asks what the sheriff will say about them carrying pistols. |
|
3063 | Unnamed American Legion Member 3 |
In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). To pass the time, this man starts a poker game on Saturday night that lasts through Sunday night. |
|
3064 | Unnamed American Legion Member 4 |
In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). Because he holds "the equivalent of a commissioned rank," this young man is appointed by Grimm as the "second in command" of the platoon he forms (456). He is the one who, on Grimm's orders, turns on the "fire alarm" after Christmas escapes (458). |
|
3065 | Unnamed American Legion Members |
The American Legion was organized in 1919 for veterans of the First World War. In Light in August it is to the local members of this organization, now civilians working in "stores and offices" in Jefferson (453), that Grimm turns for volunteers to preserve peace and order after Christmas is arrested. Despite the initial resistance of the American Legion Commander, some American Legion members, and Sheriff Kennedy, he gets enough volunteers to create "a fair platoon" (453). |
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3066 | Unnamed Arkansas Doctor |
In Light in August, when Hines realizes his daughter Milly is pregnant, he "starts out to find a doctor that would fix it" (377). He does not succeed, but according to his wife, he does "beat up a doctor in another town" (378), possibly because he refuses to perform an abortion. |
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3067 | Unnamed Arkansas Officers |
In Light in August, after Hines threatens the congregants in a Negro church with a pistol during a prayer meeting, "the law" comes and arrests him (378). 'Officers' is our way to translate "the law" into the terms of a Character database; presumably Faulkner is thinking of a few policemen or deputy sheriffs. |
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3068 | Unnamed Woman in Car |
In Light in August this woman shrieks in a "shrill voice" when the car in which she is riding passes Joe Christmas standing naked at the side of the road (108). |
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3069 | Unnamed Choir at Country Church |
In Light in August this is the choir that Byron Bunch leads on Sunday mornings in the country church "thirty miles" from Jefferson (48). |
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3070 | Unnamed Church Superintendent |
In Light in August the superintendent in Jefferson's Presbyterian church orders the organist to play to distract the congregation from Mrs. Hightower's behavior during a church service. |
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3071 | Unnamed Owner of Circus |
He owns the circus at which Milly Hines meets the father of her baby in Light in August. He appears in the novel during Milly's father's murder trial, to testify that the man Hines murders "was a part nigger instead of Mexican" (377). |
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3072 | Unnamed Circus Workers |
When a wagon in a traveling circus gets stuck near the Hines' home in Light in August, "the men" borrow tackle to move it from Doc Hines (373). One of these men, presumably, is the man who will become Joe Christmas' biological father; as the Unnamed Father of Joe Christmas he has his own entry in this index. |
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3073 | Unnamed Clerk at Varner's Store |
This man waits on Lena Grove at Varner's store, where she buys cheese, crackers, and a box of sardines - which they both pronounce "sour-deens" - for lunch on the way to Jefferson (27). In other fictions the clerk at Varner's is sometimes Jody Varner and sometimes a Snopes, including Flem, but there's no reason to assume the clerk in Light in August is any of these people. |
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3074 | Unnamed College Leaders |
In Light in August these officials and board members of Negro schools and colleges in the South regularly correspond with Joanna Burden, from whom they seek and receive business, financial, and religious advice. Joanna assumes that any of them would admit Joe Christmas to their school on her account. |
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3075 | Unnamed Confederate Doctors |
In Light in August these military physicians tend soldiers wounded in battle during the Civil War. They are often assisted by Reverend Hightower's father, who learns from them to practice medicine. |
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3076 | Unnamed Confederate Pickets |
From these "Confederate pickets close to the enemy's front" in Light in August it is learned that Pomp has been trying to get behind Yankee lines to find his missing master, whom he believes is a prisoner of war (476). |
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3077 | Mrs. Gail Hightower |
Unnamed, the daughter of the head of Reverend Hightower's seminary wants desperately to escape to the wider world and chooses the young Gail Hightower as her getaway vehicle. She marries him, and schemes with him to effect his appointment to the pulpit in Jefferson. There, she tries to adjust to his neglect and inattention, but eventually begins looking for male companionship on secret trips to Memphis. They aren't secret enough to keep her from becoming a scandalous topic among the women in her husband's church. |
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3078 | Unnamed Father of Mrs. Hightower |
The father of the woman whom Reverend Hightower marries is also a minister, and a teacher at the seminary where she and Hightower meet. |
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3079 | Unnamed Country Boy in Car |
In Light in August this "countryboy" is driving past the Burden place with his girlfriend when sees Joe Christmas, naked and waving a pistol; the gun explains why he stops and allows him into the car (297). He has the presence of mind to plan to carry Joe to his own house, while pretending to be taking a shortcut. |
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3080 | Unnamed Landholders |
The description in "Knight's Gambit" of the people who watch the polo matches at the Harriss plantation includes (separate from the "farmers" and "the tenants and renters and croppers") a group it calls "the landholders" (163). This presumably refers to the owners of the farm land that is worked by the tenants, renters and sharecroppers, though Faulkner usually refers to them as landlords or land owners - or "planters," the word he uses elsewhere in the story: "the bottomland planters” (251). |
|
3081 | Unnamed Local Casualty of War |
When in "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II, he has a kind of prevision of a young man from Yoknapatawpha whose death during the fighting overseas will be reported in the local paper, along with a photograph showing "the country-boy face" inside "the uniform still showing the creases of the quartermaster shelves" (251). |
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3082 | Unnamed Parents of Local War Casualty |
When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he has a kind of prevision of the local young men who will soon be killed in the fighting, and the grief of "those who had created" them, without realizing that the day would come when their child "might die in agony" in a foreign place they "had never even heard of before" and didn't even know how to pronounce (251). |
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3083 | Unnamed Negro Boys 2 |
In "Knight's Gambit" these "two Negro boys" work on the Harriss plantation and "lay the trail of torn paper from one jump to the next" for the steeplechase (165). (The context makes it seem likely that these are men rather than "boys," and that that word should be understood as an example of how the Jim Crow culture used stereotypical language to demean black men.) |
|
3084 | Unnamed Negro Farm Workers |
The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit. |
|
3085 | Unnamed Negro Groom |
In "Knight's Gambit" this is the specific groom among the various stablemen who work for Sebastian Gualdres who is in charge of his blind "night horse"; Gauldres tells Gavin Stevens that this mare "is left in the stable by the negrito each afternoon" (227). |
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3086 | Unnamed Negro Grooms |
In "Knight's Gambit" the animals on the Harris plantation are very well attended to. There are not only "grooms" for the horses (234), but also "special human beings to wait on" the dogs (165). |
|
3087 | Unnamed Negro Hotel Employees |
In "Knight's Gambit" Max Harriss is "well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" at the Greenbury hotel in Memphis (208). |
|
3088 | Unnamed Negro Nursemaid |
The nursemaid who takes care of Mrs. Harriss' son Max in "Knight's Gambit" is "a light-colored Negress a good deal smarter, or at least snappier-looking than any other woman white or black either in Jefferson" (158). The Mansion also refers to this character as "the nurse," but does not otherwise describe her (217). |
|
3089 | Unnamed Negro Farm Worker |
In "Knight's Gambit" this is the "barefoot" field hand who is driving the carriage the first time Gavin Stevens sees the woman he will marry after he himself has returned from World War I (245). |
|
3090 | Unnamed Neighbor of Mrs. Harriss |
This man is a "neighbor" of Mrs. Harriss in "Knight's Gambit"; because he passes her property "on his way home," he can provide the people in Jefferson with information about Gualdres' odd behavior at nights (178). |
|
3091 | Unnamed New Orleans Friends |
After rebuilding his house in "Knight's Gambit," Mr. Harriss "begins to bring friends up from New Orleans" (162); "strange outlanders" (163); "men and the women with a hard, sleek, expensive unmarried air and look about them even when now and then some of them really were married to each other perhaps" (163). |
|
3092 | Unnamed Operators |
Passing through Jefferson from preflight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators" (251). "Operators" here seems to mean 'managers.' |
|
3093 | Unnamed Original Owner of Dangerous Horse |
In "Knight's Gambit" Rafe McCallum acquires the horse that Max Harriss buys from "some owner" who may have "ruined" it by trying "to break its spirit by fear or violence"; it is rumored that McCallum bought the horse "because its owner wanted to destroy it" (210-11). |
|
3094 | Unnamed Private Detective |
Although he is something of a private detective himself, Gavin Stevens hires this private detective to surveil Max Harriss in Memphis; as he puts it, "A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it" (201). |
|
3095 | Unnamed Railroad Engineer 1 |
In "Knight's Gambit" this is the engineer of the train Charles Mallison is taking to preflight training; he "blows the whistle at" Charles because he is holding up the train's departure (257) . |
|
3096 | Unnamed Russian Woman |
The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917. |
|
3097 | Unnamed Secretary |
According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). It seems likely that, even if Harriss died in a different way, the "secretary" referred to here exists, and did make this call to Mrs. Harris, who is in Europe at the time her husband dies. |
|
3098 | Unnamed Smugglers |
When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247). |
|
3099 | Unnamed Telegram Delivery Boy 3 |
This "boy" delivers Markey's telegram to Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" (208). Most delivery boys and men in the fictions are black, which would give additional possible meaning to the term "boy," but since Faulkner does not specify this character's race - and based on the character who delivers telegrams to Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury - we assume this one is white. |
|
3100 | Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 4 |
"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163). |
|
3101 | Unnamed Translator |
In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison says that "without doubt" Gualdres must have used an "interpreter" to him help him enlist in the U.S. Army in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war (254). |
|
3102 | Unnamed Tutors |
In "Knight's Gambit" the tutors employed to educate the Harriss children at home are described, with some irony, as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145). |
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3103 | Unnamed Whites in Jefferson |
The "white people" who live by the railroad tracks in Jefferson's "purlieus" don't live in "cabins," a word they associate with the Negroes in a nearby neighborhood - a distinction, the narrative says, they will "fight" to maintain (252-53). Their sense of insecurity suggests that their own social and economic status is not much above that of the blacks who are almost their neighbors. |
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3104 | Unnamed World War I Soldiers 2 |
In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.) |
|
3105 | Unnamed Farmers 6 |
These Yoknapatawpha farmers are part of "Knight's Gambit" in two ways. As a larger group, they become part of the audience that watches as Mr. Harriss transforms a traditional county plantation into a kind of Hollywood set. Some of them cross "the whole county" to watch the landscapers and builders at work (161), and "farmers" are specifically included in the groups of spectators who attend the sporting events that are staged there (163). |
|
3106 | Harpe Brothers |
During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail. |
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3107 | Homer |
Homer is the classic Greek epic poet to whom The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed. His blindness is part of his mythic status. To Gavin Stevens, Homer is proof of what mankind can achieve: despite his disability, he "charted the ultimate frontiers of passion and defeat and glory and ambition and courage and hope and fear" (200). |
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3108 | Murrell's Gang |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts. |
|
3109 | Unnamed Aviator 2 |
Invented by Gavin Stevens in "A Name for the City," this aviator aspires to be the latest individual to set a new speed record for traveling around the world. Stevens gives him elementary emotions and diction, suggesting that a lack of respect for such an individual. |
|
3110 | Unnamed Brawlers and Drunkards |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6). |
|
3111 | Unnamed Circumnavigators |
In "A Name for the City" Gavin Stevens refers to the "world travelers" who made history by circumnavigating the globe, from the first ones, who did it in "three years" (he is referring to Magellan's voyage in a sailing ship, 1519-1522), to the ones who did it in "ninety hours" (he is referring to the crew of the US Air Force B-50 bomber who made the trip in 1949); Gavin wrongly adds that "now" - when the story was published, presumably - the feat has been accomplished in "thirty hours" (200). |
|
3112 | Unnamed Greek Child |
According to Uncle Gavin in "A Name for the City," this child provides useful and necessary assistance to the magnificent Greek poet, Homer. |
|
3113 | Unnamed Pioneers and Settlers |
During the time covered by "A Name for the City," the white settlement that becomes Jefferson is first occupied by two men and a boy who are given names by the narrator and their own character entries in our database - see Doctor Habersham, Doctor Habersham's Son and Alexander Holston. This entry represents the next two generations or at least phases of inhabitants, the men who can called pioneers and settlers. |
|
3114 | Unnamed Wilderness Outlaws |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, these "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200, 4). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204, 9). |
|
3115 | Unnamed Would-be Lynchers |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, as soon as the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (206, 11). |
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3116 | Unnamed Young Men of Ikkemotubbe |
In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208). |
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3117 | General Bee |
"Bee" (Bernard Elliott Bee, Jr.) was a newly appointed general from South Carolina when the battle of "First Manassas" was fought (36); although Requiem for a Nun does not mention it, he was mortally wounded during the fighting there. |
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3118 | General Burnside |
The "Burnside" who makes the list of men who heard the "hackle-lifting" rebel yell in Requiem for a Nun had command of the Union Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg. |
|
3119 | Governor Claiborne |
In Requiem for a Nun Governor (William C.C.) Claiborne was the "Territorial Governor" of Louisiana, the land the U.S. acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, from 1804 to 1812 (85). |
|
3120 | Henry Clay |
Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 (referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi. |
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3121 | Abraham DeFrance |
According to Requiem for a Nun, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938). |
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3122 | Drake, Brothers of Temple |
Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.) |
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3123 | Buzzard Egglestone |
Beroth Egglestone is a real man who served in the Civil War as a Union General. Afterwards he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains how he acquired the unflattering sobriquet that Requiem for a Nun uses to refer to him: "Buzzard" (87). |
|
3124 | Famous Mississippians |
At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created. |
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3125 | Jailer Farmer |
Ironically, the "turnkey" or "jailor" in Jefferson during the Civil War in Requiem for a Nun is "a failed farmer," who secures the position through political influence (179). |
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3126 | Mike Fink |
Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived. |
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3127 | Governor Henry |
Referred to in the script as "GOVERNOR" and addressed, by Gavin, only by his first name - "Henry" (90) - the man who meets with Gavin and Temple in Act II of Requiem for a Nun to hear an informal appeal on behalf of Nancy is referred to as "the last, the ultimate seat of judgment" (89). In the stage directions he is identified not with Mississippi but with a "mythical" State, "the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit" (89) - though elsewhere in the novel there is no ambiguity about the literary 'fact' that Yoknapatawpha is in Mississippi. |
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3128 | Hemingway |
Ernest Hemingway was the American writer whom Faulkner considered his rival for most of his career, though the two men had a cordial long distance relationship and Faulkner often alluded to or quoted from Hemingway in public statements. In Requiem for a Nun Temple alludes to Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to explain that a woman who has been sexually assaulted could be in denial that it had happened to her: "it had never actually happened to a g-- woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged" (121). |
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3129 | Commissioner Hinds |
Thomas Hinds was a hero of the War of 1812 who afterward commanded the Mississippi territorial militia. After Mississippi gained statehood in 1817 he turned to politics, serving in the state legislature and later in the U.S. Congress. In 1821, along with James Patton and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79). |
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3130 | Governor Humphries |
Benjamin Humphreys (Faulkner misspells his name in Requiem for a Nun) was a Southern officer during the Civil War who turned to politics during Reconstruction. In October, 1865, he was elected Governor of Mississippi as a Democrat. As an unpardoned Confederate he was ineligible to serve by the terms of surrender, so he had himself inaugurated and sworn in. In June, 1868, Federal troops were used forcibly to remove him from office. He was a strong advocate of Jim Crow laws as a way to deny freed slaves their rights as citizens. |
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3131 | Commissioner Lattimore |
A physician by training, William Lattimore was politically active during the years in which the Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi. In 1821, along with James Patton and Thomas Hinds, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79). |
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3132 | Le Fleur |
Louis LeFleur was a French Canadian voyageur, or explorer. The "trading-post store" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun on the bluffs above the Pearl River became the seed for the city of Jackson (84). He married a local Choctaw, the daughter of a chief, and had a son named Greenwood Le Flore, who also appears in the novel's cast of characters. |
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3133 | Leflore |
Greenwood Leflore (as Requiem for a Nun spells his name, though LeFlore is historically more accurate) was the son of Rebecca Cravatt, the daughter of a Choctaw chief (not mentioned in the novel), and Louis LeFleur, a French Canadian fur trader. He was educated by white Americans in Nashville. |
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3134 | Nancy Mannigoe |
As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed. |
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3135 | General McClellan |
The "McClellan" who earns a spot on the list in Requiem for a Nun of the Civil War generals on both sides who heard the "shrill hackle-lifting" rebel yell in battle (188) is Union General George McClellan, commander-in-chief of the army that faced Lee during the early months of the Civil War. |
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3136 | Commissioner Patton |
A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, Patton became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79). |
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3137 | Pete |
Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132). |
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3138 | Unnamed Alabama Farmer |
In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182). |
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3139 | Unnamed Ancestors of Temple Drake |
When Temple Drake Stevens describes her ancestors to Gavin Stevens, she mockingly points to "long lines of statesmen and soldiers high in the proud annals of our sovereign state" (95). |
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3140 | Unnamed Anglo-Saxon Pioneers |
The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180). |
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3141 | Unnamed Children of Pioneers and Indians |
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Anglo-Saxon" pioneer not only fought the Indians he found in the territory; he also fathered children on some of them: "scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness" (81-82). "Dusky bellies" is ambiguous, but almost certainly refers to Indian women. And while miscegenation between black and white in Faulkner's world made one a 'Negro' and socially inferior, it was common for 'white' southerners to boast of a Native American ancestor on the family tree. |
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3142 | Unnamed Chippeway Indians |
In Requiem for a Nun, these are the eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. It seems likely that at least some of them, like the canoes they traveled in, are Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada. |
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3143 | Unnamed Civic Officials |
Requiem for a Nun notes when the "sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk" (35), the "bailiffs" (36), and the other officials of Jefferson occupy the newly constructed courthouse (35). |
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3144 | Unnamed Confederate Officer |
In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36). |
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3145 | Unnamed Inmates 3 |
The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that at least in Requiem for a Nun this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race. |
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3146 | Unnamed Descendants of Modern Planter |
In its account of modern changes in Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun focuses on the generational experience of the "son" of the large plantation, who goes to World War II from "the seat of the tractor" with which he, rather than his father's tenants, works the land; upon his return he leaves behind "the long monotonous endless unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields" to live with his wife and growing family "in automobile trailers of G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges" (193). |