Character Keys

In The Town Jabbo Gatewood is the son of Uncle Noon Gatewood, who as a blacksmith shod horses. In a sign of social change, Jabbo becomes an automobile mechanic: "Jabbo was the best mechanic in the county and although he still got drunk and into jail as much as ever, he never stayed longer than just overnight anymore because somebody with an automobile always needed him to pay his fine by morning" (71).

In The Town W.C. Handy, the famous Negro band leader and composer "from Beale Street in Memphis," provides the music for the Cotillion Ball (76). In the larger canon, Handy also provided Faulkner with the title of the short story "That Evening Sun" (1931) - one of Handy's most famous songs is "St. Louis Blues" (1914), which begins "I hate to see that evening sun go down." The novel calls him "Professor Handy" (76); Handy called himself, and has often been called by others, 'the Father of the Blues.'

In The Town Ashley Holcomb is one the boys in the Harrykin Creek hunting party.

In The Town, Mr. Kneeland owns the tailor shop in Jefferson, where he makes men's clothes and rents out formal menswear, such as the tuxedos worn to the Cotillion Club ball.

Matt Levitt won the Golden Gloves boxing competition "up in Ohio or somewhere last year," according to Charles Mallison in The Town (192). Gavin says, "He graduated from that new Ford mechanic's school and the company sent him here to be a mechanic in the agency garage" (192). Levitt owns a yellow cut-down racer, and Linda rides in it with him. He and Gavin, for a time, are rivals for Linda's attention. After Matt bloodies Gavin's face and has a violent altercation with Anse McCallum, the sheriff runs him out of Jefferson.

In The Town Cedric is the son of Mrs. Nunnery and about five years old. After he goes off to play in a culvert, the search for him results in Eck Snopes' accidental death. Cedric himself returns unscathed.

In The Town Sally Priest's husband, Maurice, fights with Grenier Weddel and blacks one of his eyes for sending his wife "not just what Father called a standard panic-size corsage, but a triple one" (81). Then, at home, Maurice Priest blackens his wife's eye. (The Maury Priest who appears in The Reivers is apparently a different character.)

She is the wife of the original Vladimir Kyrilytch and mother of the second. She is the daughter of a Virginia farmer who hid and fed the Russian-born mercenary soldier when he escaped from an American prison during the Revolutionary War. At some point they married, and began the line of "V.K."s that culminates in the character readers meet frequently in the fictions. As her story is told in The Townand repeated in The Mansion, her maiden name was Ratcliffe, and the couple adopted it as their married name. Over time, the "c" and "e" were dropped from the spelling.

In The Town this woman is the wife of the highway engineer who moves to Jefferson, where they discover that their second grade son has polio.

In The Town Whit Rouncewell first appears when he tries to find the town's night marshal Grover Cleveland Winbush after seeing "them two fellows in Christian's drug store" (169). He is probably a relative of Mrs. Rouncewell, perhaps her son; he is definitely a contemporary of Linda Snopes: later in the novel, he is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He appears again in The Mansion, the next and last book in the Snopes trilogy.

In The Town Mr. Widrington is a newcomer to Jefferson who drives his wife and her pedigree dog around town in a Cadillac.

In The Town Mr. Wildermark owns a store on Courthouse Square and orders "men's shoes which buttoned, with toes like small tulip bulbs, of an archaic and obsolete pattern," for Miss Mannie Hait once a year (244).

Miss Wyott is a teacher in Jefferson in The Town, but the narrative notes that her "own people" - that is, her ancestors - "had come from the country (her own branch of it remained there where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson)" (154). (In The Reivers Faulkner re-names the family that owns this spot Wylie.)

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott is the second grade teacher who encourages and advises Wallstreet Panic Snopes throughout his public school education and beyond. She is a descendant of an old Yoknapatawpha family, but after teaching in Jefferson for a decade she decides "to accept a position in a school in Bristol, Virginia" (154). It would seem likely that she and the Doctor Wyott who runs the Academy that his grandfather founded must be related. Both these descendants of generations in Yoknapatawpha share a common interest in eduction.

The Oxford, Mississippi, lawyer with whom Linda consults while attending the University of Mississippi is named Stone in The Town. At her request, he devises a "contingency" by which Linda stipulates that Flem Snopes should receive any inheritance she is left by her mother. "He was very nice," Linda says (342). (He is mentioned but not named in The Mansion.) The real person behind this character is unquestionably Oxford resident Phil Stone, a lawyer and a descendant of a prominent local family.

In The Town Gavin hires these "masons" to attach the medallion of Eula to her tombstone (370). These artisans should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the fraternal society who are also mentioned in the novel.

Jefferson is governed by an elected Board of Aldermen as well as a Mayor. This unnamed alderman in The Town is the one who responds to Gavin Stevens' request that the town drain the water tank to find the brass Flem has stolen by saying, "I don’t know how much it will cost to drain that tank, but I for one will be damned - " before Gavin cuts him off (89). (See also Unnamed Board of Aldermen in this index.)

These are the people referred to in The Town as "somebody with an automobile" (71), a small but growing group of Yoknapatawpha residents during the period in which the novel is set. They bail Jabbo out of jail whenever one of them has a car that needs fixing.

In The Town Charles explains the origins of Yoknapatawpha's white population's basic moral code by referring to the past. Their ancestors, he says, "hadn't quitted home and security for a wilderness in which to find freedom of thought as they claimed and oh yes, believed, but to find freedom in which to be incorrigible and unreconstructible Baptists and Methodists; not to escape from tyranny as they claimed and believed, but to establish one" (321).

In The Town the bank's board of directors meets during the Byron Snopes embezzlement crisis. In The Mansion they appear more obliquely, when Flem claims he has to confer with the bank director's before taking over the mortage on the Compson property.

This entry represents the boys who appear or are referred to in various passages in The Town. For example, Mink Snopes called out from the jail to passing boys "he could trust would deliver his message" to Flem Snopes (85). "All the boys in town" appreciate Eck Snopes' goodness and the "raw peanuts" he is always willing to share with them (116). "All the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older" enjoy stealing watermelons from Ab Snopes' patch, then watching him rage about the loss (138).

These workers begin remodeling Manfred de Spain's house after Flem purchases it in The Town. They are adding columns consistent with the stereotypical image of the antebellum mansion.

None of these people are mentioned as individuals in The Town, but Gavin and Charles pay a visit to this community, where the local population was "having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181).

Ab Snopes' Civil War wound was never received in battle, or even from a Yankee, but Faulkner provides several different accounts of the Confederate who shot him while he was stealing a horse and left him with a lifelong limp. In "Barn Burning" that man is identified as "a Confederate provost's man" (5). We are assuming this is the same person who shoots him in two other texts, which provide slightly different versions of Ab's wounding.

After Linda Snopes stops going out with Matt Levitt in The Town, he replaces her with "a country girl he had found somewhere" (206).

In The Town, Gavin refers to the women - groups of "four or five or six ladies in sunbonnets" who live on "back-country roads" (240) - as the customers to whom Ratliff sells sewing machines, and from whom he has learned how to listen. Gavin's use of "ladies" is generous; these are the wives of the poor farmers who inhabit Yoknapatawpha's "back-country" in the fictions.

In Chapter 17 of The Town Gavin refers several times to the people who owe Flem Snopes money. He describes them variously as people owing "sums ranging from twenty-five cents to five dollars" (291); as people "who had been paying [Flem] the usury on five or ten or twenty dollar loans" (295); and as people against whom Flem holds "a usurious note or mortage" (299).

In The Town Ratliff claims it was "the depot agent" who sent I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule - though he may have done that himself. (In "Mule in the Yard" the local man who sends I.O. the schedule is identified as the "town wag.") It is definitely an agent at the station, and so presumably the same man, who takes Flem Snopes' payment for freight charges on Eula's medallion.

Thinking about the local men killed in the war leads the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" to imagine "all the grieving about the earth, the rich and the poor too" (103): the people who lose loved ones in the fighting.

In The Town, this second-grade boy moves to Jefferson with his parents. When it is discovered that he has polio, the school that he and Chick attend is closed. He is hospitalized in Memphis, and Eula says to Chick, "Let's hope they got him to Memphis in time" (324).

In The Town Ratliff mentions "the directors of the Bank of Jefferson" - the other bank in town, rival to the Sartoris Bank - when he tells Gavin about Wallstreet Panic Snopes' business plans (152): they apparently authorized a loan to him.

The federal drug inspectors who audit the narcotics in Uncle Willy's drugstore in The Town criticize him for his poor security of the morphine (163).

'Fish grabbling' means catching fish underwater with one's bare hands. That's what these men in The Town are doing when they find Mink Snopes' shotgun in the slough where he had thrown it. (See also Unnamed Negro Who Finds Gun in this index.)

In The Town this girl is discovered in an "empty cotton house" having sex with "schoolmaster" Snopes (43). (See also the Unnamed Eleven-Year-Old Girl who appears in The Mansion, and may be the same character.)

Uncle Billy's Frenchman's Bend Masons are in charge of Eck Snopes' funeral in The Town. (The first American chapters of the social order known as Freemasonry were organized in Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. Many of the Founders of the Revolutionary era were Freemasons, which is why the U.S. dollar includes masonic symbolism. Not long after the Revolution ended there were 'lodges' in all the states, but I confess it's surprising to think that such a small and impoverished place as Frenchman's Bend had its own chapter.)

Gavin counts on these friends who live in New York to help Linda during her move to Greenwich Village. Ratliff says, "Lawyer had it all arranged, friends he knowed in Harvard to meet the train at the depot and take care of her, get her settled and ever thing" (367).

When he becomes vice president of the bank in The Town, Flem employs this salesman in a Memphis furniture store to provide him with appropriate home furnishings.

Ratliff reports to Gavin in The Town that Will Varner had three biracial concubines, "the first Negroes in that section of the county and for a time the only ones he would permit there, by whom he now had grandchildren" (289).

According to The Town, before the Civil War, Willy Christian's grandfather owned Walter's grandfather. The employer-employee relationship described in the novel between Willy and Walter has affinities with this master-slave relationship. (See also Hoke Christian's entry in this index. He is Willy's father in the story "Uncle Willy," and may have been the man Faulkner was thinking of when he created a grandfather for Willy.)

This unnamed grocery store owner in The Town is young Wallstreet Panic Snopes' employer. In time, Wall becomes his partner.

Unlike the other drivers in The Town, this one is imaginary. In his hypothetical account of Flem's trip to Frenchman's Bend in Chapter 17, Gavin describes the man who drives him as an outsider: his car "would not bear Yoknapatawpha County license plates" (305). (In Chapter 18, Ratliff describes how he himself drove Flem on that trip.)

In Chapter 17 of The Town Gavin refers, hypothetically, to "some dedicated enthusiast panting for martyrdom in the simple name of Man" whom Flem could get to "shoot old Will some night" (302). The context suggests that this potential solution to Flem's problem is invented by Gavin as much if not more than by Flem.

In The Town Gavin nags the Italian consul in New Orleans in an attempt to hasten the arrival of the medallion containing Eula's "carved marble face" (368).

This principal awards Wallstreet Panic Snopes his diploma in The Town.

This woman in The Town - identified by Charles' narrative only as "the first lady" (53) - reproves Maggie Mallison for calling on Eula Snopes.

A secret fraternal order originating in medieval ritual, the Masons advocate charity and obedience. In The Town Eck Snopes was an active member among the Frenchman's Bend Masons, and Will Varner encouraged the Masons in Jefferson to find an appropriate job for Eck after his neck was broken. When Eck dies, the Masonic Lodge buries him, displaying their ritual "aprons" and "signs" at his funeral (117).

In The Town, along with the Episcopalian minister Mr. Thorndyke, these three "pastors" - identified as "the Methodist, the Baptist, the Presbyterian" - call on Gavin Stevens at the request of their congregations to offer Gavin their assistance with Eula's memorial service. Gavin calls them all "Doctor" (359), but in the distribution of names Charles' narration clearly distinguishes between the Episcopalian and the other three; Charles calls Thorndyke as "our" pastor - i.e.

Chick's father in The Town - Charles Mallison, Sr. - owns the town livery stable. He notes that because so "many of my customers use horses and mules for a living," it would be bad for his business if he owned an automobile (65).

Byron Societies were originally literary groups that met to read and discuss the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron. By the time of The Town, the Jefferson version of the Byron Society was essentially a social club for upper and middle class women. Like the Cotillion Club, membership in the Society confers social prestige.