Character Keys

In The Town the Jefferson hotel porter named Samson works with someone whom Ratliff refers to as "Samson's least boy," whose one action in the novel is carrying a newspaper for the white bondsman when he leaves the hotel (103). It's not clear what "least boy" means - perhaps he is a bellboy at the hotel or possibly he is Samson's youngest son.

In The Town this "houseman in a white coat" performs general duties in for Manfred de Spain's house, and lives in Manfred's "late father's big wooden house" (14).

Although they are unseen in The Town, Charles knows there are "pullman porters" on the train that arrives in Jefferson in Chapter 24 (377). Shortly after the Civil War a white man named George Pullman designed the original sleeper cars for passenger trains, and hired blacks, in many cases former slaves, to serve as the attendants in those cars.

Although he's usually the first employee off the train when it arrives in Jefferson, in The Town this porter on the train carrying Byron's children lets the conductor and the flagman exit the train first (377).

After Matt Levitt's departure in The Town, Linda begins to go to and from school "with another girl who lived on the same street" (222).

In The Town these undescribed Northern tourists admire Jefferson's Episcopal church and photograph it. Charles wonders at their attitude toward the church, "since they themselves had burned it and blown it up with dynamite in 1863" (321). As a Southerner, he's using a generic idea of 'Yankees' - whether Union troops in the Civil War or Northern tourists in the mid-20th century.

Only referred to generically in The Town as "the oil company," these faceless men "cuss Mr [Eck] Snopes" for his foolishness in blowing himself and one of their tanks up, but also give his widow $1000, "even if she had married a fool" (117).

These are the "two more boys" whom Wall Snopes hires in The Town to help his brother, Admiral Dewey, deliver newspapers and "handbills" around Jefferson (135).

According to The Town, the members of the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian churches in Jefferson constitute the two oldest congregations in the county, dating from "before the county was a County and Jefferson was Jefferson" (321).

In The Town, I.O. Snopes refers, resentfully, to the men who own the railroad he regularly sues as "them cold hard millionaire railroad magnits" (i.e. magnates, 260)" - because when Mannie Hait's husband was killed on the track, they awarded all of the indemnity to her.

Like other Indian tribes in the old South, the Indians of Yoknapatawpha own slaves in various Faulkner fictions. The slaves of the Chickasaw who appear in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are specifically referred to as the slaves of Mohataha, Ikketubbe's mother who rules the tribe in those texts. In the short story and in Act I of the novel, these enslaved people purchase items at the Indian agency-store in the settlement (17).

In The Town Charles notes that Jefferson's Episcopal church, "the oldest extant building in town," and perhaps "the finest too," was "built by slaves" (321).

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott's colleague is watching when Wallstreet proposes to Miss Vaiden (153).

In The Town these two men attempt to help Gavin Stevens stand up after Manfred de Spain strikes him down (79).

According to Ratliff's account in The Town, "there's a thousand extry young fellers all new and strange and interesting and male" at the University of Mississippi (271). Ratliff believes that among these young men might be Linda's future husband. Flem later thinks about this group as "a thousand young men, all bachelors and all male" - and a threat to his financial interest in Linda (304). (The University of Mississippi began admitting women in 1882.)

In "Mule in the Yard" and again in The Town a fire engine full of "volunteer fire fighters" arrives too late to save Mrs. Hait's house, although the men are in time to "fling her dishes and furniture up and down the street" in the attempt (258, 252).

In The Town it is the wife of the furniture salesman in Memphis who knows what kind of furniture Flem wants for his new house, and she provides it. She is mentioned again as "the Memphis expert" who "learns Eula" what the home of a bank vice president should contain (173).

The Town refers to the "Yankee raiders" who were present in Mississippi during the Civil War as the stuff of "legend" - the legend of the treasure that remains hidden where the plantation owners supposedly buried their "money and plate" to keep them safe from these invaders (8). (In earlier Yoknapatawpha fictions, the Sartorises did bury their silver and Union troops did dig it up.)

In The Town Ratliff calls the first man sent to Jefferson by the company that insures the bond on Mayor de Spain a "pleasant young feller" who realizes at the end of "one quick horrified day" that settling Gavin's law suit calls for someone with more experience (87).

Referred to in Flags in the Dust as "a sort of patriarch" among the Negro tenants on the Sartoris estate, and described as old enough to be "stooped with time," he owns the facilities - the mill and mule that grind the sugar cane and the kettle in which the juice is boiled - for making molasses (288).

In Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody's household of black servants includes, to quote his dehumanizing description of them, "six or seven registered ones" as well as "a new yearlin' every day or so" (303). Like Abe, the only servant who is named, their main task seems to be assisting the gentlemen and ladies who come to fish at the doctor's pond.

While drinking moonshine with Young Bayard and Hub in Flags in the Dust, V.K. Suratt tells them about the time Doctor Peabody amputated his "granpappy's laig," using whiskey as the anesthetic (136).

Shreve is Quentin Compson's Canadian roommate at Harvard in two of Faulkner's greatest novels: The Sound and the Fury (where his last name is MacKenzie) and Absalom, Absalom! (where it's McCannon). In the first novel he's largely defined by his concern for Quentin's well-being, which apparently leads some of their fellow students in the novel (and has definitely led a few critics writing about the novel) to speculate that the bond between them may be homoerotic.

In The Sound and the Fury the conductor standing beside Quentin on the back platform of the trolley twice suggests that Quentin should "get a seat" inside the car (171).

In "Death Drag" Jock is one of Faulkner's aviators who cannot stay away from airplanes: a former pilot in the Royal Flying Corps who has lost his civilian pilot's license but continues to fly nonetheless. He is a tall, dashing figure whose stained clothing and unruly hair indicate that he doesn't care about his physical appearance; insomniac and perennially thirsty, he is emotionally tense and self-contained and won't accept offers of help from his former comrade-in-arms, Captain Warren.

Myra Allanovna in The Mansion is the Russian immigrant proprietor of an upscale New York store where she sells the neckties she designs. She is described by Ratliff as "a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn't a fitted nobody," but he adds that she has "the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they popped a little" (186). (Faulkner almost certainly bases this character on Lucilla Mara de Vescovi, an Italian immigrant who opened Countess Mara, a men's neckwear company, in New York in the early 1930s; Countess Mara ties are still sold today.)

"The only sister of old Major de Spain," Mrs. Allison in The Mansion is "a bed-ridden old woman living in Los Angeles" (463). She and her daughter end up owning 'the mansion' after which the novel is named. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Allison family that appears in the earlier short story "Beyond," the text doesn't say so.)

One of the prisoners at Parchman penitentiary when Mink is there in The Mansion, Jake Barron has "most of his head blown off" when he tries to escape (107).

Luther Biglin's wife in The Mansion has some political clout because she is the "niece of the husband of the Sheriff, Ephraim Bishop's wife's sister" (448); this connection helps explain how he got the job as county jailer.

In The Mansion Luther Biglin's mother is the sister of a "rural political boss whose iron hand ruled one of the county divisions" (448). The division is not Frenchman's Bend, because this man's rule is compared to Will Varner's "at Frenchman's Bend," but we cannot say what other part of the county it is (448). This boss helped elect Sheriff Bishop, and so Bishop gives his wife's son (Luther) the job of county jailer.

George Washington Carver was an early 20th century Negro scientist and inventor who promoted crops, especially peanuts and sweet potatoes, as alternatives to cotton. The principal of Jefferson's Negro school mentions him in The Mansion when talking with Gavin about Linda Snopes' efforts to reform education for the country's black children (248).

The Mansion provides no other name but "Dad" for the itinerant worker whom Mink meets at Goodyhay's house. He is "apparently as old as" Mink, and wears "a battle jacket" (293).

Apparently he is the owner of "Dilazuck's livery stable" (202), but he himself never appears in The Mansion.

Although The Mansion quotes "the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin" telling the French people to "Be calm. I am here" (231), in historical fact Maurice Gamelin was the French Army General whose handling of the German invasion in World War II was a disastrous failure.

A former "Marine sergeant" (295) who, after seeing a vision of Jesus during a battle in the Pacific, comes back to the U.S. to run a religious community out of his ramshackle house. His wife reportedly "ran off" with a salesman while Goodyhay was at war (294). He is described in The Mansion as "a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic strip Puritan" (293).

In The Mansion Marvin Hait is "our local horse-and-mule trader" (202). He may be the same character as Hait, the mule trader who appears in "Mule in the Yard," and Lonzo Hait, as he is named in The Town, but the 'corrected text' of The Mansion says nothing to make that more or less likely. (On the other hand, in their one volume edition of the Snopes trilogy the editors at Random House changed Hait's first name in The Mansion from Marvin to Lonzo.)

The Mansion's cast of characters includes the "last descendants" of Alexander Holston, one of the first white settlers in Yoknapatawpha and the man who established the oldest hotel in Jefferson. These two women are described as "maiden sisters," though the narrator adds, parenthetically, that "one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted" (421). They now own the Holston House, and run it with "cold and inflexible indomitability" (421).

Hopkins was an American social worker who served in Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet and was one of the President's closest advisors. In The Mansion Charles puts his name on the list of the people "they called communists now" (237).

Hugh Johnson was the head of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), one of the government agencies that Franklin Roosevelt created during the Depression. In The Mansion Charles puts his name on the list of the people "they called communists now" (237).

In The Mansion Mack Lendon's mother weighs close to two hundred pounds and "liked to cook and eat both" (205). Hence, she probably does not mind taking Tug in.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin led the Communist revolution against czarist rule in Russia, and was the head of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Gavin mentions him in The Mansion when he refers to Communist Russia as "Lenin's frankenstein" (259).

The "Malraux" whom Linda tells about in The Mansion when she returns to Jefferson from fighting in the Spanish Civil War is Andre Malraux, the French novelist and socialist who fought for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War (241). Since he helped organize their small air force, Linda and Barton Kohl could have known him well.

Otis Meadow fill is the irascible neighbor of Orestes Snopes in The Mansion, and is "so mean [i.e. miserly] as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill" (361).

Doc Meeks himself does not appear in The Mansion, but the "patent medicine truck" he drives around Yoknapatawpha advertises "Watkins Products" - a real manufacturer of health medicines that has been in business since just after the Civil War - on "both [its] sides and the back" (171). The novel describes those advertisements as the source of the name that the parents of Watkins Products Snopes gave their son.

Leader of Italy's National Fascist Party and the country's Prime Minister from 1922-43, during which time he took his country into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. The Mansion links his name with Hitler's several times.

The son of Jefferson's cobbler and himself the local house painter, Tug Nightingale is over thirty years old when he enlists - over his father's furious objections - in the U.S. Army at the start of World War I in The Mansion. He serves in the War as a cook.

Eddie Rickenbacker was the most famous American aviator during World War I. He is mentioned in The Mansion by Strutterbuck, who calls him "Rick," implying an acquaintance with the "Ace" who shot down twenty-six enemy planes (84). But there is not the slightest chance that Strutterbuck is telling the truth.

McKinley Smith in The Mansion is the "son of an east Texas tenant farmer" (373).

This is the younger Spoade, who in The Mansion follows his father's footsteps from South Carolina to Harvard. He is a classmate of Charles Mallison; he invites Charles "to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like" (229). (The Saint Cecilia Society in Charleston is an upper class social club that was originally organized in 1766; its annual balls have been around since 1820.)