Character Keys
Code![]() |
title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
3147 | Unnamed Enslaved Girl 1 |
Owned by Mohataha, the matriarch of the Chickasaws in Requiem for a Nun, this "Negro slave girl" holds "a French parasol" over her master when Mohataha comes to town in a wagon (169). |
|
3148 | Unnamed Enslaved Girl 2 |
In Requiem for a Nun this "female slave child" sits next to Mohataha in her wagon, holding "the crusted slippers" that originally came from France (170). |
|
3149 | Unnamed European Mistress |
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). |
|
3150 | Unnamed Exchange Students |
In Requiem for a Nun these "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194). Calling out-of-state students "exchange students" is an odd formulation, suggesting that 'the North' they come from is essentially a different country - as of course it would have been to the Confederates who originally carried those flags during the Civil War. |
|
3151 | Unnamed Federal Land-Agent |
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). |
|
3152 | Unnamed Federal Marshal |
In Requiem for a Nun this man attends Mohataha and the Chickasaws' removal from Yoknapatawpha along with the "Federal land agent" (170). |
|
3153 | Unnamed Federal Army Provost-Marshal 2 |
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. |
|
3154 | Unnamed Federal Army Provost-Marshals |
The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun treats the "Federal provost-marshals" who came to the defeated South charged with protecting the rights of the slaves who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War according to the then-popular pro-Southern accounts of Reconstruction: the elections they preside over are described as corrupted by carpetbaggers (87). |
|
3155 | Unnamed Freedmen |
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). |
|
3156 | Unnamed Frenchmen |
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Frenchman" alternated with "the Spaniard" for possession and control of the area (81). Historically, this land was claimed and ruled over by France several different times during the 18th century. |
|
3157 | Unnamed German Blacksmith |
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). |
|
3158 | Unnamed German Carpetbagger |
Like another of the earliest settlers in Jefferson mentioned in Requiem for a Nun, this man is "German" and a "blacksmith" (183), but they are very different figures. This man is one of the "carpetbaggers" who come to Jefferson at the end of the Civil War, a deserter from the Union Army who arrives "riding a mule" and, according to the tales that were later told about him, bringing with him "for saddle-blanket sheaf on sheaf of virgin and uncut United States banknotes" - no doubt nefariously obtained (183). |
|
3159 | Unnamed Governor's Lieutenant |
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). |
|
3160 | Unnamed Grandmother of Cecilia Farmer |
This "grandmother" appears in Requiem for a Nun only to explain how Cecilia Farmer inscribes her own name and the date on a pane of glass in the jail: she uses her grandmother's diamond ring (182). |
|
3162 | Unnamed Enslaved Coachman 2 |
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). |
|
3163 | Unnamed Enslaved Footman 2 |
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 enslaved "coachman" is one of the two Grenier slaves who appear in the narrative when Grenier drives his "imported carriage" into Jefferson to see the construction of the new courthouse. |
|
3164 | Unnamed Heirs of Louis Grenier |
In Requiem for a Nun the "heirs" of Louis Grenier are briefly mentioned in connection with a financial legacy he left the town (35). |
|
3165 | Unnamed Hotel Residents |
Out of towners who stay at "the hotel" in Jefferson are categorized in Requiem for a Nun as "drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses" (189). "Drummers" are traveling salesmen. |
|
3166 | Unnamed Wild Indians and Whites |
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). |
|
3167 | Unnamed Inhabitants of Jefferson |
In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190). |
|
3168 | Unnamed Interned Japanese Americans |
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. |
|
3169 | Unnamed Japanese-American Soldiers |
In Requiem for a Nun the German tank gun that serves as Jefferson's monument to the men who served in World War II was captured "by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms," the sons of interned Japanese Americans (194). (Over 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, many in the 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.) |
|
3170 | Unnamed Land Speculators and Traders |
In Requiem for a Nun this group of "land speculators" and "traders in slaves and whiskey" follow the pioneers into Mississippi (172-73). |
|
3171 | Unnamed Stonemasons 1 |
In Requiem for a Nun the "masons who erect" the Confederate statue in Courthouse Square are mentioned, but not described (189). They should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the secret society who are mentioned in The Town. |
|
3172 | Unnamed Militia Band |
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. |
|
3173 | Unnamed Mississippi Indians 2 |
Requiem for a Nun lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising. |
|
3174 | Unnamed Mississippi Legislators 1 |
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). |
|
3175 | Unnamed Mohammedan Prince |
One of the more exotic characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this "Mohammedan" prince has a "European mistress" in Requiem for a Nun; he never appears in the novel, but is mentioned as the man who built the "hideway" in the south of France where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens take their honeymoon (122). |
|
3176 | Unnamed Aboriginals 2 |
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. |
|
3177 | Unnamed Negro Iceman |
Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.) |
|
3178 | Unnamed Negro Leaders |
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). |
|
3179 | Unnamed Negro Residents of Jefferson |
There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190). |
|
3180 | Unnamed Negro Who Kicks Nancy |
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). |
|
3181 | Unnamed New Settlers |
According to the history of Jefferson provided by Requiem for a Nun, soon after the first whites arrive in Yoknapatawpha come these "new" settlers: "new names and faces too in the settlement now - faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible antecedents other than mammalinity nor past other than the simple years which had scored them" (12). |
|
3182 | Unnamed Participants in Nancy's Trial |
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. |
|
3183 | Unnamed Modern Planter |
In Requiem for a Nun this 20th-century "planter" is a generic figure whose fate suggests the kinds of changes that have occurred in Yoknapatawpha: where once he had slaves and then tenants to work his fields, after his "son" is drafted in the second World War it is the planter himself who does that, riding "on the seat of his tractor" (193). |
|
3184 | Unnamed Negro Preacher 2 |
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. |
|
3185 | Unnamed Performers on Radio |
The representation of modernity in Requiem for a Nun includes "the boom and ululance of radio," represented by the voices that are heard on it: "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists" (192). |
|
3186 | Unnamed Reader |
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. |
|
3187 | Unnamed Returning Confederates |
The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184). |
|
3188 | Unnamed Riverboat Gambler |
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). |
|
3189 | Unnamed Salesgirls in Memphis |
In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112). |
|
3190 | Unnamed Early Settlers |
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. |
|
3191 | Unnamed Sexual Partners of Nancy |
In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute. |
|
3192 | Unnamed Slave of German Blacksmith |
In Requiem for a Nun the slave "belonging to the German blacksmith" is one of the men who help to build the courthouse (24). |
|
3193 | Unnamed Slave Owners |
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, the "Anglo-Saxon pioneer" (81) was followed by wealthier settlers who built the "river towns" like Vicksburg and Natchez, "men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats, who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds" (82). Included in this group is the first planter to grow cotton in the region - "someone brought a curious seed into the land . . . and now vast fields of white" covered the land (83). |
|
3194 | Unnamed Slaves in Jackson |
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. |
|
3195 | Unnamed Sons of Cecilia Farmer |
After the Civil War and her marriage in Requiem for a Nun, Cecilia (nee Farmer) becomes "the farmless mother of farmers (she would bear a dozen, all boys . . . ), bequeathing to them in their matronymic the heritage of that invincible inviolable ineptitude" (203). |
|
3196 | Unnamed Southern "Aristocrats" |
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). |
|
3197 | Unnamed Spaniards |
According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, not long after the Mississippi River was explored to its mouth, "a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic Ocean"; over the next period of time "the Spaniard" alternates with "the Frenchman" as the main inhabitant of the place (81). Historically, this land was claimed and ruled over by Spain several different times between the 1540s and the later 18th century. |
|
3198 | Unnamed Spanish-American War Soldiers |
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). |
|
3199 | Unnamed Steamboat Captain |
The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun includes a mention of "the captain" of a riverboat who puts a "gambler" off his ship (83). Steamboats began traveling on the Mississippi River and its tributaries around 1811. |
|
3200 | Unnamed Three Frenchmen |
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. |
|
3201 | Unnamed Trial Spectators 2 |
These are "the invisible spectators" in the courtroom who "gasp" at Nancy's response upon being given the death sentence at the start of Act I in Requiem for a Nun (41). The play's second scene makes it clear that Temple and Gowan Stevens are among those present, but from the text's only description of the spectators - they are "invisible" - we cannot say that for sure. |
|
3202 | Unnamed U.D.C. Ladies |
"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. |
|
3203 | Unnamed Visitors |
In Requiem for a Nun, these people are the "kin or friends or acquaintances" of the "outlanders" who move to Jefferson after World War II; they are described as visiting "from the East or North or California" on their way "to New Orleans or Florida" (196). |
|
3204 | Unnamed Wife of Cashier |
The "childless wife" of the bank cashier who beats Nancy is only mentioned in Requiem for a Nun. |
|
3205 | Unnamed Women of Jackson |
The "Jackson women" who in Requiem for a Nun sponsor the three-day "Kermis Ball" to raise money for a Confederate monument in 1887 may belong to an early version of a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (87). The term "kermis" refers to an outdoor festival. |
|
3206 | Unnamed Young Northern Woman |
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). |
|
3207 | Unnamed Young Southern Woman |
Requiem for a Nun establishes the social status of Jefferson's "Female Academy" by referring to the value that a "certificate" from it has for "a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" (177). |
|
3209 | Mister Ernest |
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. |
|
3210 | Simon |
The Simon who appears in "Race at Morning" is not Simon Strother, who appears in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished. Like that earlier 'Simon,' however, he is a servant, one of black cooks for the white deer hunters. He also handles the hunting dogs while the white hunters pursue deer. |
|
3211 | Unnamed Father of Narrator 3 |
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. |
|
3212 | Unnamed Mother of Narrator 2 |
The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his mother "maw" (307). She abandons him and his father two years before the story takes place, when she "took off in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast" for her son (308). |
|
3213 | Unnamed Game Wardens |
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." |
|
3214 | Unnamed Hands and Tenants at Van Dorn |
In "Race at Morning" there are both "hands and tenants" on Mister Ernest's property (308). The narrator does not define the difference, but presumably the "hands" work for a salary, and the "tenants" farm a parcel of land for a share of the crop after it is harvested. The narrator's parents were among the "tenants"; no other members of either group are described, but it's likely that there are blacks as well as whites among them. |
|
3215 | Unnamed Man from Vicksburg Roadhouse |
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). |
|
3216 | Unnamed Wife of Mister Ernest |
Mister Ernest's wife died of unspecified causes three years prior to the time of the narrative in "Race at Morning" - that is, a year prior to Mister Ernest adopting the narrator. |
|
3217 | Boys Named Remish |
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. |
|
3218 | Unnamed Army General |
In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this officer pins a medal on Devries; in the story it's for his heroism during the Korean War; in the novel, during World War II. |
|
3219 | Unnamed Army Nurse 2 |
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. |
|
3220 | Unnamed Army Nurse 1 |
In The Mansion this army nurse, "kin" to a Jefferson family, comes to Jefferson after the end of World War I as the town's "first female hero," having served as a lieutenant on a base hospital in France "within sound of the guns behind Montdidier" (199). |
|
3221 | Unnamed Army Officer 1 |
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. |
|
3222 | Unnamed Helper of Clarence Snopes |
This entry represents the "somebody" who gets a car in both "By the People" and The Mansion and then (as "they" in the short story and as "somebody" in the novel) drives Clarence Snopes home to get a dry pair of pants. |
|
3224 | Unnamed Girls of Frenchman's Bend |
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). |
|
3225 | Unnamed "Feller" Who Tricks Clarence Snopes |
When Ratliff tells the story of how Clarence Snopes' political campaign ended ingloriously in "By the People" and again in The Mansion, he invents this man who plays the dirty trick on Snopes to hide himself behind. In the story he calls this "feller" a "low-minded rascal," an "underhanded son of a gun" and a "low-minded scoundrel" (138). In the novel he refers to him as an "anonymous underhanded son-of-a-gun" and an "underhanded feller" (349). In neither text, however, does Ratliff fool his listeners - or, almost certainly, any of Faulkner's readers. |
|
3226 | Unnamed Members of Clarence Snopes' Gang |
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). |
|
3227 | Unnamed Members of Ku Klux Klan 2 |
In "By the People" and again in The Mansion Clarence Snopes uses Yoknapatawpha's Ku Klux Klan to advance his own political career, which serves as the occasion for Faulkner's one explicit engagement with the Klan as an element in U.S. history. Historically the Klan is a terrorist, white supremacist organization that came into existence in the South after the surrender at Appomattox and the abolition of slavery. |
|
3228 | Unnamed Members of Silver Shirts |
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. |
|
3229 | Unnamed Negro Army Soldier 1 |
In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this soldier accompanies Devries to the front line and helps lead the trapped battalion back to safety. He is called a "runner" (134, 339) which probably means he is a soldier assigned to a commanding officer, though it may also mean messenger. The only difference between the two texts is that in the story this happens in Korea, while in the novel it's somewhere during the fighting in World War II. |
|
3230 | Unnamed Negro Army Soldier 2 |
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). |
|
3231 | Unnamed Negro Sergeant |
In "By the People" this Sergeant is serving in the Korean War when "single-handedly" he and Devries hold off an enemy attack to allow the escape of a trapped battalion (134). He is wounded during the action. This Sergeant appears again when The Mansion describes the same event, with one difference - in the novel the man's heroics occur during World War II (339). |
|
3232 | Unnamed Negro Troops |
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. |
|
3233 | Unnamed Negroes in Frenchman's Bend |
Although in other Yoknapatawpha fictions the population of Frenchman's Bend is almost entirely white, local Negroes appear in "By the People" and again in The Mansion in two ways. The "roistering gang" that Clarence Snopes leads frequently "beats Negroes" (89, 328). When Clarence becomes the Bend's constable, he also hits the "first few Negroes who ran afoul of his new official capacity . . . with the blackjack he carried or the butt of the pistol which he now officially wore" (89, 329). |
|
3234 | Unnamed Sister of Devries |
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. |
|
3235 | Unnamed Twin Nephews of Devries |
When Ratliff calls Devries two nephews "them foreign twin boys" in "By the People," he means they are not from Yoknapatawpha (138). In that story and again in The Mansion, they are apparently old enough to understand "what might happen" if Clarence Snopes' legs are anointed by "damp switches" from the dog thicket, and to know how to do so without getting caught (138, 349). |
|
3236 | Eve Adams |
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). |
|
3237 | Mr. Adams |
In The Town Adams is the Jefferson mayor who precedes Manfred de Spain in the office: "the mayor with a long patriarchal white beard, who probably seemed to young people like Cousin Gowan older than God Himself, until he might actually have been the first man" (11). |
|
3238 | Theron Adams |
In The Town Theron is the youngest son of Mayor Adams and Eve Adams; he declines Manfred de Spain's challenge to fight him. |
|
3239 | Henry Best |
In The Town Henry Best is the loudest and most exasperated man in Stevens' meeting with the town's aldermen to settle the questions raised by the stolen brass. |
|
3240 | Preacher Birdsong |
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. |
|
3241 | Bishop 2 |
In The Town this unnamed Bishop "boy" is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He is identified as "the youngest Bishop," but the novel says nothing about the others in his family (222). (In The Mansion a man named Ephriam Bishop is the sheriff.) |
|
3242 | Ephriam Bishop |
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.) |
|
3243 | General Burgoyne |
General Burgoyne was a British commander who, as Eula puts it in The Town, "surrendered in the Revolution" after his forces were surrounded by a superior force of colonial soldiers (338). Historically his defeat had important results for the cause of American independence; in the novel, his surrender made V.K. Ratliff's ancestor the family's first American. |
|
3244 | Walter |
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). |
|
3245 | Clefus |
Gavin Stevens' janitor in The Town is named Clefus. Charles Mallison speculates about how pleasantly surprised he was when he came in "to sweep the office" and found the whiskey toddy Gavin had left untouched on his desk (376). |
|
3246 | Jack Crenshaw |
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). |
|
3247 | Miss Elma |
Despite her title, "Miss Elma" in The Town is the widow of the previous county sheriff who now works as the "office deputy" for Sheriff Hub Hampton (183). |
|
3248 | Eunice Gant |
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.) |
|
3249 | Garraway, Father of Mr. Garraway |
In The Town Mr. Garraway inherits his general store and its "worn counter" from his father (328). |