Character Keys

These are the family members in The Mansion who sell Meadowfill the wheelchair that belonged to the dead woman who was their relative and his neighbor.

In The Mansion this boy "delivers the Memphis and Jackson papers" in Jefferson (371). The town speculates that Meadowfill pays him to "bait his orchard at night," in order to attract Res Snopes' hog (371).

In The Mansion Charles describes how "the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then" (199) and the "eight- and nine- and ten-year old males" (200) regarded the men returning from in World War I with their "wound- and service-stripes" and "medal ribbons" (200).

While some "old people" are included in the group in The Mansion that goes to the movie in Jefferson ("couples, young men and girls and old people," 36), this entry represents the "old people" that the narrative specifically identifies, who "didn't go to the picture show" but instead sit in their rocking chairs (38).

The Mansion refers to "Yoknapatawpha County's three original settlers" (421) but only gives one of them a name: Alexander Holston (he has his own Character entry). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions this group always includes Samuel Habersham, sometimes along with his (unnamed) son; in "Hand Upon the Waters," the group includes an ancestor of Gavin Stevens as one of the three.

"They were picking the cotton now" (100) - after Mink has been released from the penitentiary, this is how in The Mansion he thinks about the inmates who remain in Parchman's, most of whom work as field hands on the farm around the prison.

These "dozen trusties" in the Parchman penitentiary are not described in any detail in The Mansion (74), but "trusty" is the generic term for prison inmates who can be trusted to help the authorities administer the institution. They are typically given (minor) privileges and allowed (limited) freedoms that other inmates aren't. Montgomery Ward Snopes assumes Flem could bribe one of them to kill Mink for "ten grand" - ten thousand dollars (74).

These two men run the pawn shop that sells Mink a gun in The Mansion. They are described as being "blue-jowled as pirates" (320).

Will Varner's picnic is attended by "every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules" (348). The Mansion takes for granted the fact that "every voter" is white.

The ministers in Jefferson, all of whom are Protestants, resent Eula for her open infidelity. Later in The Mansion, however, the town's "white ministers" cannot find a reason to "go on record against" Linda Snopes Kohl's work as a Sunday school teacher at "one of the Negro churches" (254).

"Turnkey" is a colloquial term for jailor; this "turnkey" is the official at Parchman in The Mansion who opens the gate for Mink's release (423).

According to The Mansion's account of how a Russian fighting for the British as a German mercenary during the Revolutionary War became the founder of the Ratliff family in Yoknapatawpha, the name first belonged to a farm family in Virginia. Some time after Nelly Ratcliffe begins secretly feeding Vladimir Kyrilytch, she "brings him out where her folks could see him" (184). Some time after that, her "ma or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor," noticed that she was pregnant, "and so" Nelly and this first V.K. were married, using her last name (184).

The reference to this character|these characters in The Mansion is a good example of how hard it is to create data entries for many of the inhabitants of Faulkner's imaginative world. As part of the novel's description of Jake Wattman's moonshine operation, the narrator refers to the "recurrent new reform-administration sheriff" in Yoknapatawpha who hopes to raid it (244). "Sheriff" is singular. "Recurrent," however, suggests more than one sheriff.

These 121 Mississippi Representatives are the political colleagues of Clarence Snopes in The Mansion. With him included there are 122 total members of the House, which is a historically accurate number. Clarence addresses these men soon after assuming office.

The "RFC captain" in World War I who, according to Uncle Gavin in The Mansion, was so young and had "such a record" that the British government sent him home before the end of the war so that "he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority" - i.e. the day he turned twenty-one (232). (The Royal Flying Corps was the original name of the RAF, the better-known Royal Air Force.)

In The Mansion when Linda Snopes Kohl tells the Mallisons "about the people" in the Spanish Civil War, she includes "a Russian poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed" (241). It's not clear whom Faulkner has in mind, if he has a real poet in mind at all, but since the other two writers Linda mentions - Hemingway and Malraux - are historical figures who were in Spain, he may mean Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who was killed fighting for the Republicans in that war.

In The Mansion the Parchman warden shows Mink a telegram from the Chief of Police in San Diego giving information about Stillwell's death.

At the wedding reception in Kohl's studio apartment in The Mansion, Ratliff notes the "two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne," but adds that "three or four" of the guests were "helping too" (191).

In The Mansion this man provides "the beer and the laundry" for Miss Reba's brothel, but continuously tries to cheat her (81).

This figure in The Mansion is a hypothetical character, the stereotypical 'judge' whom condemned men threaten to take revenge against.

This hypothetical character in The Mansion is the stereotypical witness who testified against a criminal who was convicted - and who that criminal is going to get even with at some point.

In The Mansion Mink sees this engineer "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39).

On his journey to Europe in The Mansion, Chick has two unnamed traveling companions. He ends up traveling alone, however, when "at the last moment [they] find themselves incapable of passing Paris" (230).

In The Mansion, the "overalled men" of Frenchman's Bend regularly gather at Varner's store, to "squat or stand all day against the front wall or inside the store itself" (29).

In The Mansion McCarron is meticulously attended to by two waiters at the New York restaurant.

The warden at Parchman when Mink first arrives there in The Mansion is remarkably kind to his prisoner, helping Mink with his correspondence to his wife.

In The Mansion there are a number of couples waiting in line to get married by the "REGISTRAR" at New York's City Hall (191).

The female clientele at the "joint" where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion would be more surprised by an ear trumpet than a "G string" (275). They are presumably, like Linda, women who work in the shipyard because the male population has gone to fight in the war; the reference to the "G string" as well as the noise in the "joint" is the narrative's way of implying how non-traditional, by the standards of southern gentility, is their behavior and appearance.

Veterans who have returned from fighting in the Second World War are a major element of the social landscape in the second half of The Mansion. Goodyhay's unconventional congregation is made up mainly of vets, or their surviving parents and spouses; one of them wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been" to the church service (305). Because they know what "Devries's medal meant," veterans form an important element in the anti-Snopes coalition during the 1946 Congressional election (346).

In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

According to Mink's narrative in The Mansion, Fonzo Winbush's mother "wasn't a Snopes" (80). She tells Fonzo never to stay anywhere that isn't managed by a woman who looks "mature and Christian" and "most of all motherly" (80).

In Absalom! Colonel Willow is the commander of the University Grays in 1865, when he allows his fellow officer, Colonel Sutpen, to use his headquarters tent to meet with Henry.

In "Two Soldiers" this is the first soldier that the Grier boy speaks to in Memphis. He is wearing an "arrerhead on his sleeve" (94), so he is possibly a member of the 36th Infantry Division ("Arrowhead"), which was activated on November 25, 1940.

Although Go Down, Moses does not say so explicitly, this man would have been a slave on the Beauchamp plantation before the Civil War. After it, he is an "ancient and quarrelsome" old man who continues to live with his former master, Hubert Beauchamp (289).

The young woman whom Bayard calls "Cousin Melisandre" in the short story with the long title "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" is a upper class refugee: she leaves Memphis after it is captured by the Union forces to spend the War at the Sartoris plantation in northern Mississippi. She seems related to Bayard on his mother's (Millard) side, but the only information the story provides about her family is General Forrest's reference to "that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian" (694).

Though called "Owl-by-Night" the first time he is mentioned (363), this Chickasaw is more often referred to in "A Courtship" as "Owl-at-Night" (364). He is one of the young men who were interested in Herman Basket's sister - until they realized that Ikkemotubbe wanted her. After that, he willingly helps Ikkemotubbe with his efforts to win the young woman.

In Intruder in the Dust the white people who crowd Jefferson's main streets in anticipation of the arrival of a lynch mob from Beat Four are from everywhere in Yoknapatawpha except Beat Four. It begins to form on Sunday morning, with a small group made up of young men from town.

In comparing Mr. Harriss to Huey Long in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison describes how the politician "made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere," probably not "even caring what the people who wrote and edited it" produced (241). Faulkner is referring to a real magazine, the Louisiana Progress.

In "Knight's Gambit" Gavin Stevens learns that Max Harriss is "well known" to the "taxi-drivers" in the area of Memphis around the Greenbury Hotel (208).

Requiem for a Nun refers to three generations of descendants from the "Ratcliffe" who first arrived in the settlement that became Jefferson, and notes how over that time the name "lost the 'c' and the final 'fe' too" (13). Although he is not singled out in this text, the latest descendant is V.K. Ratliff, one of Faulkner's favorite characters - although in the Requiem passage Faulkner seems to have forgotten that his name still has both "f"s.

Describing her married life in Requiem for a Nun, Temple refers to the "country club younger set" of friends with whom she and Gowan socialize (124). Apparently assuming it is a progressive gesture, these friends "applaud" when Temple hires the black "ex-dope-fiend" Nancy as a nurse for her children (124).

In Requiem for a Nun Temple compares her own experience overcoming trauma to this fictional character. Although Faulkner blurs the details, saying that the book in which this woman appears was written by "somebody - Hemingway, wasn't it?" (121), it's very likely that Temple is thinking of Maria, a character in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Temple's account, this character freed herself from the past by "refusing to accept it" (121).

In a facetious passage connecting the lost lock in 1826 to the future of the U.S., the narrator of Requiem for a Nun makes "a glorious prophecy" about the when when the American "people" will identify federal money with the "manna" of a generous god (17). They are described as "a race of laborers" whose only labor it to consume government funds (17).

Requiem for a Nun identifies the voters in Yoknapatawpha during the hundred years after the building of the courthouse in 1835 as "the white male citizens of the county" (37). Historically of course, a pair of Constitutional amendments gave black males the right to vote in 1870 and women the vote in 1920, but perhaps the novel is reminding us about the peculiar (unwritten) constitution of the world Faulkner is representing.

In The Reivers Otis tells Lucius that Aunt Fittie, who took Corrie in after her mother's death, "might have been kin to some of us," but that isn't definite (153). She lives "in a house on the edge" a small town in Arkansas and prostitutes the "eleven or twelve" year-old Corrie to local men for fifty cents a visit (154).

The first Ballenbaugh in Yoknapatawpha is as colorful as the place that bears his name. Described in The Reivers as an "ancestryless giant," he arrived in the county "from nowhere" and by some means - the narrative implies a coercive one - took over the store and ferry run by a man named Wylie (72). Under his ownership, the place became a "roaring" one: a "grubbing station and saloon" for the wagon-drivers who passed through on the way to or from Memphis (72).

In The Reivers Ballenbaugh's is currently owned by the "only child" of the second Ballenbaugh, a "fifty-year-old maiden" (74). She is described as a "prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman" who makes her living farming the land, and "running a small store" that has a loft which accommodates overnight guests (74). She may be "fleshless," but the food on "the table Miss Ballenbaugh sets" is well known for the pleasure it provides (74).

"Mr Ballott's first wife" was the daughter of Dan Grinnup (8). Ballott's other wife or wives are not mentioned, and The Reivers does not explain why he is no longer married to this woman, but divorce is so rare in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha that it seems likely she has died.

"Uncle" Parsham Hood's daughter and Lycurgus' mother is explicitly named "Briggins" - though her husband is not mentioned in The Reivers.