Character Keys

She is the "European mistress" of the "Mohammedan prince" in Requiem for a Nun who built the "hideaway where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens honeymoon (122).

This man and "his marshal" are on hand when Mohataha and her people leave Yoknapatawpha for the "Indian Territory" in the "West" - presumably to make the Chickasaws' 'removal' official, though Requiem for a Nun does not specifically mention the Removal (170).

In Requiem for a Nun the jail is used as the "provost-marshal's guard-house" during the Union occupation of Jefferson during the Civil War (196); a provost marshal is in charge of a unit of military police.

In Requiem for a Nun the people who were formerly enslaved in Jackson and elsewhere are referred to, tangentially, in the negative characterization of the Federal officials who administered the post-war attempt at Reconstruction: they are the "freed slaves" whose votes those "carpet-baggers" know how to manipulate (87). Presumably this group also includes the students who attend Jackson's three "College[s] for Negroes"; the colleges are mentioned in the text but not the people who attend them (87).

Among the first settlers in Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun is a man referred to as "the German blacksmith"; all that is known about him, however, is that he is one of the few white men in the original settlement who owns a slave (24).

Referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "one" of the Governor's "lieutenants," this man was taken to court in a paternity suit (196).

According to the account of Yoknapatawpha's history in Requiem for a Nun, the first slaves were brought into the county by Louis Grenier. This "slave coachman" is one of the two Grenier slaves who appear in the narrative when Grenier drives into Jefferson to see the construction of the new courthouse. The other settlers expect the two slaves to help with that work, but Compson invokes "the rigid protocol of bondage" - that is, the unwritten rules that govern master-slave relations - and says no "stable-servant" like the coachman can be ordered to do "manual labor" (27).

In Requiem for a Nun the "heirs" of Louis Grenier are briefly mentioned in connection with a financial legacy he left the town (35).

The Mississippi wilderness in Requiem for a Nun is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or 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" (10).

As noted in Requiem for a Nun, during World War II the U.S. government interned over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them US citizens) as "enemy aliens" (194). Most of these people had been living on the west coast, and all the interment camps they were taken to were west of the Mississippi.

In Requiem for a Nun this group of "land speculators" and "traders in slaves and whiskey" follow the pioneers into Mississippi (172-73).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these militia men are "part of a general muster at the settlement . . . for a Fourth of July barbeque" (201, 5). Like stereotypical frontiersmen, they are soon "ejected" from town for their "drunken brawling" (201, 5-6). After running into and capturing a gang of bandits, they return to the settlement in hopes of claiming a reward; instead, they are eventually locked up with the outlaws they had captured.

According to the account of the development of Mississippi from wilderness to civilization in Requiem for a Nun, "the politicians" follow the "land speculators" (172). The novel's history of the place that became Jackson more specifically notes the role the legislature played in creating a new state capital after the Mississippi territory achieved statehood in 1817, though it also notes, wryly, how at various later moments "the Senate" and "the House" alternately sought to change the location (85-86).

The narrator of Requiem for a Nun begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi.

According to the narrator of Requiem for a Nun, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87).

All we know about referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "the man who kicked" Nancy and caused her miscarriage is that he might have been the unborn child's father (219). Because the assault happened at "a picnic or dance or frolic or fight" and Nancy would not have been allowed to attend a gathering of whites, we are assuming this man is black (219).

In the play's first scene in Requiem for a Nun, "a section of the court" is represented on stage, and the stage directions list "the judge, officers, the opposing lawyers, the jury" (39). The "judge" and one of the officers - the bailiff - speak in the scene, and so have their own Character entries. This entry represents the other men referred to, though it's unlikely that any production of the play would cast actors to represent the "opposing lawyers" or "the jury" on stage.

Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends.

Near the end of the third prose section of Requiem for a Nun, the narrator looks up from the story he is telling to address the reader directly as "you" (198). He identifies the reader as "a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West" (198), and speculates that "you" may be college educated, or "perhaps even" have an graduate degree from "Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205). This second person plays a significant if rhetorical role in the way the history of Yoknapatawpha is ultimately evoked.

According to the history of Jackson recounted in Requiem for a Nun, as the territory became more settled, the "steamboat gambler" replaced the keelboatman as "the river hero" (83). Since the gambler is only seen being put off the steamboat and "marooned" on a small island, the term "hero" is presumably freighted with irony (83).

At various points in its prose history of Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson, Requiem for a Nun refers to the settlers who followed the frontier pioneers into the new land. There is some overlap in its representation of this group, and in the terms - frontier, pioneer - used to categorize them.

In Requiem for a Nun the slave "belonging to the German blacksmith" is one of the men who help to build the courthouse (24).

Requiem for a Nun mentions the "Negro slaves" who belonged to the men who settled the territory around what became Jackson (82), but as is also the case with most of the "slaves" in Yoknapatawpha it mentions, these enslaved people are not described in any way.

The cotton economy created what Requiem for a Nun calls "its own parasitic aristocracy," which includes "merchants and bankers" and "lawyers" as well as the planters who live "behind the columned porticoes of the plantation houses" (179).

Describing the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900, Requiem for a Nun notes that "sons" of the "old men in gray" who attend the ceremony "had already died in blue coats in Cuba" - i.e. were young men from Yoknapatawpha who died serving in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War (189).

One of the "three Frenchmen" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun traveling down the Mississippi River in "a Chippeway canoe" is almost certainly René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the 17th-century French explorer credited with discovering the river and claiming it and all the territory it drained for France (81). But it's not clear why Faulkner associates him specifically with two other Frenchmen. The actual party of Frenchmen and French-Canadians who, along with a group of Canadian Indians, traveled downriver to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682-1683 was much larger.

"The U.D.C. ladies" who "instigated and bought" the Confederate statue that stands at the center of Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun are members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of Southern women that was founded in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee (188). Members actively served the 'Lost Cause' of the Old South and the Confederacy by sponsoring the construction of monuments, lobbying boards of education, and so on.

The "childless wife" of the bank cashier who beats Nancy is only mentioned in Requiem for a Nun.

Requiem for a Nun's narrator creates this 'character' as a point of reference. As part of his description of Jefferson's "Female Academy," he mentions a hypothetical "young female from Long Island or Philadelphia" who receives an invitation "signed by Queen Victoria" (177).

According to the twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" Mister Ernest "wasn't jest a planter; he was a farmer" too - which means he worked on his land along with "his hands and tenants" (308). He raises "cotton and oats and beans and hay" (309) at Van Dorn, his estate somewhere close to the wilderness in which the hunt takes place. A widower, he adopts the unnamed narrator when the child's parents - tenant farmers on his land - abandon him. Mister Ernest goes deer hunting each November with a party of men from Yoknapatawpha.

The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his father "pap" (307). He leaves his son behind when he leaves the tenant cabin he lives on at Mister Ernest's place, presumably to search for his wife, who has herself run off with a "durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake" (308). He never returns for his son.

These generic game wardens - the state officers who supervise the start and ending of the deer hunting season in Mississippi - are noted briefly, only once, by the unnamed narrator of "Race at Morning."

The narrator of "Race at Morning" calls the man with whom his mother ran off "two years ago" a "Vicksburg roadhouse feller" (307). "Roadhouse" is a dialect term for an inn or tavern on the side of a road. This man may have worked there, or perhaps the phrase just means the roadhouse is where he and "maw" met (307).

According to the narrator of "By the People," the compact organs manufactured by "the Remish Musical Company of South Bend, Indiana," were so popular with the country folk in Frenchman's Bend that in time "boy children from that section were bearing into puberty and even manhood Remish as their Christian names" (87). The narrator of this story is not noticeably facetious, and Faulkner's country people in other stories name their children things like "Montgomery Ward," so there's no reason to think this is just a joke.

In "By the People" she serves in a field hospital in Korea, and helps Devries reward the soldier who saved him on the battlefield. In The Mansion she performs the same action in a field hospital somewhere else, during World War II.

This army officer - referred to as the "exec" in Devries' unit in Korea in "By the People" (134) and as the "second" in Devries' unit on a World War II battlefield in The Mansion (339) - is the executive officer who is second in command of the Negro combat unit that Devries commands. It's likely Faulkner imagined him as 'white': historically, as an officer, he would definitely have been white during World War II, and probably white in the Korean War.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion these are the "young girls" who are "terrified" by the gang that Clarence Snopes leads (89, 328).

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion, during his youth in Frenchman's Bend Clarence Snopes is the leader of a "gang of cousins and toadies" (89, 328) who terrorize the community around Frenchman's Bend. They fought and drank and beat Negroes and terrified young girls" (89) - slightly revised to "fought and drank and gambled and beat up Negroes and terrified women and young girls" in the novel (328).

Like the Ku Klux Klan, the next organization that Clarence Snopes joins in "By the People" and The Mansion - "Silver Shirts" - was a real white supremacist, antisemitic organization (131, 334). Its official name was the Silver Legion of America, but its nickname acknowledges its ideological indebtedness to Brown Shirts in Germany, the fascist group that helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power in the 1930s. It was founded in North Carolina in early 1933.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this soldier, "a hulking giant of an Arkansas Negro cotton-field hand" in civilian life (134, 339), heroically rescues Devries and a sergeant by carrying them both away from enemy fire. Devries (unofficially) recognizes his heroism by pinning one of his own medals on the man. We can hear affection and admiration in Devries' voice when he addresses the man who saved him as "you big bastard"; the narrator's tone when he persists in calling this soldier a "field hand" is harder to interpret (134, 340).

These are the two different groups of "Negro troops" who serve in the U.S. Army in World War II and Korea that Devries commands in "By the People" (134). When Faulkner has the story's narrator say that in Korea, Devries "commands troops containing Negroes" rather than "Negro troops," as in the earlier war (134), he may be acknowledging the actual, slow history of racial integration in the military. World War II was the first time the U.S. Army allowed blacks to serve in combat, but kept them in segregated units that were commanded, as the narrator notes, by white officers.

The sister of Devries in "By the People" and The Mansion is, like her brother, not from Yoknapatawpha but a county further east; she comes to the picnic at Varner's Mill to watch her brother announce his candidacy, bringing her twin sons with her.

The mother of Theron Adams in The Town is the "old fat wife" of Mayor Adams (11). To the younger people in Jefferson, she and her aged husband are disparagingly called Adam and "Miss Eve Adam" - a "fat old Eve" too old to tempt or be tempted (11).

In The Town Theron is the youngest son of Mayor Adams and Eve Adams; he declines Manfred de Spain's challenge to fight him.

Preacher Birdsong is a World War I veteran who "learned to box in France in the war" (192). He "lives out in the country," and likely is connected to the Birdsong family in Frenchman's Bend that appears in two other texts - but that's not made explicit. "Preacher" is his name, not a job title. Charles Mallison has seen him boxing with Matt Levitt.

Ephriam Bishop is the county sheriff in The Mansion when Mink is released from prison. He and Hub Hampton alternate being Sheriff every four years. (In The Town one of Linda Snopes' suitors is referred to as "the youngest Bishop" boy, but neither novel makes any connection between these two Bishops.)

Walter is Willy Christian's janitor in The Town. "His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167). He and Willy have a lot in common, according to Charles Mallison, except that "if anything Walter was a little more irascible," and instead of morphine, Walter has a weakness for the store's "medicinal alcohol" (167).

Jack Crenshaw is "the Revenue field agent that did the moonshine still hunting in our district" who calls the sheriff about Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio in The Town (182).

Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," The Town doesn't mention the fact.)