Character Keys

A patron at Reba's brothel in Memphis in The Mansion. Montgomery Ward Snopes says Strutterbuck "even got his name out a book" (86), but it's not clear what book Mink might be thinking of, and the money order he gives Miss Reba proves Strutterbuck's last name is real. Most of the rest of his story, however, rings false, including the military rank he claims and the stories he tells about his service in World War I. He is described as "about fifty," "tall, pretty big, with a kind of rousterbout's face" (83). He tries to cheat a prostitute named Thelma out of her money.

Thelma is a "new girl" at Miss Reba's brothel in The Mansion (89); Reba tells Mink that she "just came in last week" (84). Apparently she forgets to ask Strutterbuck for money before having sex with him.

When Franklin Roosevelt died in office in 1945, his Vice-President Harry Truman became the 33rd President of the United States. In The Mansion he is mentioned by the character named "Dad" in a sentence about the unorthodox theology and politics of the members of Goodyhay's congregation (300).

In The Mansion this is the "feller" - i.e. the fellow - mentioned by Ratliff who was "pistol-whipped" by Clarence Snopes when he was constable in Frenchman's Bend, and who complained effectively enough to get Clarence removed from the position (68).

"Sucker" is the generic term Montgomery Ward Snopes uses in The Mansion to refer to the kind of man who falls for Clarence and Virgil's scheme to cash in on Virgil's sexual "powers" (82). The one specific "sucker" who is mentioned during Monty's visit to Memphis is described as "a big operator, a hot sport" (92).

According to Charles in The Mansion, it "doubtless" was some "brass-hatted theorist in Personnel" in the Army who is behind the decision to have Devries put in command of "Negro infantry" because he is a "Southerner" (339).

The Backus estate has a whole slew of "butlers and footmen" just for their horses; Melisandre also has an extensive domestic staff of "maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries" (218). Later the "Negro houseman and one of the maids" are mentioned (399). The Mansion does not provide any more details, but it's safe to assume that, like the houseman, most of these employees are black, but given the racial categorization in Yoknapatawpha, it's likely that the 'secretaries' are not.

The people who are in the bank lobby in The Mansion to witness Gavin Stevens' negotiation for a loan on his car are described as "not only all the staff but the moment's complement of customers" (401).

In The Mansion these men are the crew of the bomber on which Charles Mallison is the bombardier and Plex is the pilot. After their plane is shot down behind enemy lines, they all end up in German prisoner-of-war camps together.

This is the "youngish quite decent-looking" (464) car agent who brings Linda's new Jaguar down to Jefferson at the end of The Mansion.

In The Mansion these two cattle-buyers are brought in as experts to establish the value of the heifer that Mink Snopes wintered in Houston's pasture.

The congregants in Goodyhay's church in The Mansion are mostly ex-soldiers and their wives or mistresses; one of the men wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been removed" (305), and another refers to the group as "ex-drafted sons of bitches" (300). But the group also includes "the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed" (295) as well as the men who help to build at the two church sites.

In The Mansion the exasperated president of Yoknapatawpha's Board of Supervisors meets with Flem to ask for his help in ending Linda's campaign to improve the education of local Negro children.

In The Mansion this pilot offers to let Chick Mallison train flying one of the planes he uses to dust crops.

In the chapter he narrates in The Mansion, Montgomery Ward refers to this girl when, in a passage summing up the scoundrels in his family, he talks about "Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other" (93). In The Town Wesley is caught having sex with a fourteen-year-old, so it is certainly possible that Monty is referring to a real event and victim, but it seems more probable that, as in his use of the word "infant," Monty is inventing or exaggerating here.

"The gal's paw" (424) - that is how Ratliff refers in The Mansion to the father of the wife whom the penitentiary trusty had killed. This man has "swore he would kill [the trusty] the first time he crossed the Parchman fence" (424).

These two Finns in The Mansion are among the more exotic inhabitants of Jefferson. They escaped "from Russia in 1917" and then "from Europe in 1919" (236). The 1917 Russian Revolution produced a lot of refugees and set off a civil war in neighboring Finland, but the text does not provide any details about what these two Finns were doing in Russia or why they had to "escape" from Europe when they did. "In the early twenties" they arrive in Jefferson, where one becomes a cobbler, taking over Nightingale's shop, and the other a tinsmith.

In The Mansion the story of the dead man who was married to the former prostitute in Goodyhay's congregation is told in matter-of-fact terms in a couple pages by Albert, a member of the congregation. Albert says nothing about how he married his wife, but describes how he decided to kill himself during the fighting at the start of the Second World War. He is a Lieutenant in command of an infantry platoon falling back as part of the confused retreat in "Malaya" (a British colony on the Malay Peninsula, 305).

In The Mansion Mink's lawyer speculates that after Mink gets to the penitentiary, a meddler with "access to the Governor's ear" may be able to secure his early release (50). Almost four decades later, a different Governor approves Mink's petition for freedom (408). (The actual Governors of Mississippi in 1908 and 1946 were, respectively, James Kimble Vardaman and Thomas Lowry Bailey.

The group of people in The Mansion who admire the new Jaguar in which Linda Snopes Kohl will ride away from Yoknapatawpha consists of "men, boys, a Negro or so" (464); throughout the novel the people of Jefferson are often described as spectators, but the fact that this group explicitly includes blacks as well as whites makes it worth creating as a 'character' in itself.

According to The Mansion, male "guests" staying at the Holston House are required to wear "a coat and necktie" in the dining room, while women guests must have their "heads covered" (421). The only guests whom the novel specifically identifies, however, are "drummers" - i.e. traveling salesmen - and they are all men (37).

In The Mansion Res Snopes employs "a hired Negro" to help him build a fence (363).

In The Mansion Ratliff wonders, facetiously, whether Linda has a daughter "stashed out somewhere" - because he knows that given Gavin's obsession with Eula Varner Snopes and her daughter Linda, another female Snopes would be too much for him to deal with (476).

In The Mansion The question of Linda Snopes' romantic future is answered several times, at least hypothetically, by the 'husbands' that Ratliff and Gavin imagine she'll marry some day. In the first such musing, Ratliff describes how Stevens imagines that Linda will leave Jefferson and marry "the first strange young man that happens by" (153). On another occasion, Ratliff and Stevens together speculate about whether Linda has already met her future husband during her first two or three days in the "Grinnich Village" (169).

Trying to buy ammunition to kill Houston in The Mansion, Mink claims that this unnamed black man saw a bear's footprint at Blackwater Slough.

In The Mansion Ratliff speculates that Flem has "spies" that watch Montgomery Ward's business. He imagines them as children, moreover, "since any little child hired with a ice cream cone" would suit Flem's needs (62).

Ratliff speculates in The Mansion that Stevens sits around and waits for this imagined telegraph boy to bring him news of Linda Snopes.

Clarence Snopes invents this soldier as part of his smear campaign against Devries in The Mansion, spreading the rumor that during the war Devries chose to save the Negro soldier and left this white one to die (345).

Ratliff hypothesizes in The Mansion that one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend might "persuade" a young girl on a Wednesday night to go "off into the bushes before her paw or maw noticed she was missing" (134).

Jefferson's African-American population appears in The Mansion indirectly, in several narrative references to them as a group and from several different political perspectives. On his trip into Jefferson at the beginning of the novel, for example, Mink walks through a "section [of] all Negro homes" (38) between the Square and the railroad depot; his thoughts seem to include the actual 'Negroes' who live in these homes, though no people come clearly into focus.

In The Mansion three foreign correspondents for the newspapers are among Linda and Barton's wedding guests; they are the last to leave the party.

In The Mansion Mink's wife Yetti goes back to her "people" after he is sent to jail (104). (Faulkner seems to have forgotten the biography he created in The Hamlet for the woman whom Mink marries and brings to Yoknapatawpha; if you take that earlier account into account, it's extremely difficult to imagine who her "people" might be. See the entry for Yettie Snopes in this index.)

This man owns the land on which Goodyhay wants to build his "chapel" in The Mansion; he has "changed his mind," or, Albert speculates, had it changed for him by "the bank that holds the mortgage" or maybe "the American Legion" (303).

In The Mansion Dad mentions this "mama's boy" when he tells Mink about Goodyhay's experiences during World War II. According to him, during a landing on a Japanese-held island, this Marine got "scared or tangled up in something" while under attack and had to be rescued by Goodyhay (295).

During Manfred de Spain's campaign for Mayor in The Mansion, his opponents start a rumor that he got the scar on his face from "a Missouri sergeant with a axe in a crap game" instead of from an enemy soldier while in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (142).

In The Mansion the F.B.I. agent who interrogate Stevens about Linda Snopes Kohl's activities mentions the people in the United States who are "Communist members and agents"; included in this group are "Jewish sculptors and Columbia professors" as well as "important people" (261).

The Memphis "Commissioner" in The Mansion is an acquaintance of Gavin Stevens's Harvard friend (426). Gavin's friend enlists his help in the attempt to locate Mink Snopes. Presumably he's the Commissioner of Police, though that isn't made explicit.

In The Mansion the Negro who works for Jakeleg Wattman fetching liquor bottles to the customers wears "the flopping hip boots Jakeleg had worn last year" (245).

In The Mansion this "Negro coachman" drives the young Melisandre Backus "in a victoria" (217). (This revises the way Faulkner represented Melisandre and her father's life in "Knight's Gambit"; there, although he's a planter, Mr. Backus uses a "barefoot" field hand rather than a domestic servant to drive his daughter, and a 'victoria' carriage is much more elegant than anything Backus would own, 245.)

The wife of the cotton farmer in The Mansion works with him and the whole family picking cotton, and then, with her daughter, she prepares supper according to the etiquette of Jim Crow - that is, first she serves the meal for Mink Snopes to eat alone, and then "the meal for the family" (440).

This group consists of the "girls" and "young men" - "probably the neighbors swapping the work" - who are helping to pick the unnamed Negro farmer's cotton in The Mansion (438).

Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station in The Mansion (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro.

After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). Like their teachers, these children are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246).

The river in Memphis that Mink remembers in The Mansion was lined with "chanting stevedores" loading the riverboats (315).

The first time that Linda goes into "the Negro grammar and high school" in The Mansion (246), this "alarmed messenger" is sent to tell the principal (247).

In The Mansion this "senior woman teacher" in Jefferson's Negro school seconds the principal as he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247).

In The Mansion Mink watches this Negro, who strikes him as "uppity," got off the train and put down a footstool so passengers can disembark (38).

Albert tells Mink that this son of the black woman who worships with the white members of Goodyhay's congregation "had it too just like the rest" (305). The Mansion explains what "it" is when Albert adds "even if they didn't put his name on the same side of the monument" with the whites: "it" seems to be that her son was killed fighting during World War II (305).

After someone opposed to Linda Snopes' attempt to improve black lives in Jefferson writes a racist epithet on the sidewalk in front of Flem's house in The Mansion (250), this neighbor "viciously, angrily" uses a broom to "obscure" the words (251) - not, the narrative notes, because she shares "Linda's impossible dream," but "because she lived on this street" (251).