Character Keys

During Ty Cobb's career as an outfielder with the Detroit Tigers (1905-1921) he set 90 baseball records. In The Reivers Lucius expects the grandson to whom he is telling the story in 1961 to recognize his name along with Babe Ruth's.

Mentioned first in The Reivers as "a Negro man" who works for Miss Ballenbaugh (75), Ephum presumably helps her farm, takes care of the horses of the men who stay there, and does other masculine chores around the place. Ned stays overnight at his home, which must be nearby.

"Old Dan" Grinnup in The Reivers is one of the last two surviving members of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha. A "dirty old man with a tobacco-stained beard," he is "never quite completely drunk," but obviously is an alcoholic (7). His daughter married Ballott, the stable's foreman, but apparently he owes his marginal position at work to the fact that, when the family was in better circumstances, Maury Priest "used to fox hunt with old Dan's father out at Frenchman's Bend" (8).

Henry Ford's name was almost synonymous with automobile during the early decades of the 20th century. The Model T Ford, which he introduced in 1908, brought owning a car within the reach of average Americans - though the car that Grandfather Priest owns in The Reivers is a much more aristocratic make and model.

Gabe is identified in The Reivers as "the blacksmith" at Priest's livery stable (6). "Though short, he was a tremendously big man," one of whose knees is "terrifically twisted from an old injury in his trade" (9).

Porter was a career Army officer who led a Union division at Gaine's Mill, Virginia, during the Civil War. In The Reivers it is one of the men in that division who shoots Lucius' great-grandfather "out of his saddle" (278).

According to The Reivers Boon's grandfather was "a white whiskey trader" who married a Chickasaw Indian (18).

If there is something demeaning about the way so many characters in The Reivers refer to him as "Uncle Possum," Parsham Hood is nonetheless one of Faulkner's more impressive black characters. His clothes and facial hair make him look like a white planter or a southern "colonel": upon first meeting him Lucius describes him as "an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial [beard]" (164). At another point Lucius says his appearance is "even regal" (218).

One of the men who regularly join Major de Spain's hunting parties. He is identified in The Reivers only by the adjective "old" (20). His relationship to Will Legate, who appears in other texts and is also known as a hunter, is not explained.

The father of Lucius Priest's mother, his death at the beginning of The Reivers provides the opportunity for Boon and Lucius' adventure. He and Grandfather attended "the University" (of Mississippi) at the same time, and were "groomsmen in each other's wedding" (45).

In The Reivers Lucius calls him "the aristocrat, the baron, the suzerain" (228). He does not appear in person until late in the story, but is invariably referred to as "Colonel Linscomb" by the other characters Lucius meets in Parsham. His plantation (which contains the track on which the horses race) and mansion (where the story unwinds after the races are over) are both extremely lavish and well-maintained. He is obviously an old friend of Grandfather Priest.

Butch, the deputy sheriff who bullies Boon and Corrie in Parsham in The Reivers, says his last name is "Lovemaiden" (187). This could be true, though it's not impossible that he gives himself that name as another way to annoy Boon. He is described as being "almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge" (168) and "a bachelor" (190). Lucius says he smells of "sweat and whiskey" (170).

The "Horace Lytle" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers in connection with Parsham's annual hunting dog show is almost certainly the real Horace Lytle who in 1927 became the gun dog editor of the magazine Field & Stream. The bird dog he refuses to sell for $5000 - Mary Montrose - was real too: she won the New York Dog Show in 1917.

The young black who rides Acheron against Lucius and Lightning in The Reivers is named McWillie. According to Lucius, "for size and age and color [he] might have been Lycurgus' twin" (220).

Among the well-known sportsmen who come to Parsham every winter for the "National Trials" of pedigree bird dogs, Lucius mentions four names. Two are identifiable as real men (Horace Lytle and Paul Rainey). Lucius, the narrator of The Reivers, compares "George Peyton" to Lytle: the two are "as magical among bird dog people" as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb are to baseball fans (189).

The wife of Parsham's Constable in The Reivers had a stroke "last year," and "cant even move her hand now" (257).

John Powell's wife is not named in The Reivers, but she is mentioned as having "stitched a neat strong pocket" inside his overalls for the pistol he chooses to carry (7).

The "Paul Rainey" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers was a real Northern millionaire famous for his love of hunting (163). As Lucius notes, he "liked our country enough to use some of [his] Wall Street money" to purchase 11,000 acres of Mississippi land as a hunting preserve (163). Faulkner's father Murry knew him personally.

In The Reivers Mr. Rouncewell is an agent for a company that "supplies all the stores in Yoknapatawpha County" with oil (48). Either he or the oil company is also far-sighted enough recently to have added "a special tank of gasoline" to the tanks holding oil (48). His name suggests a connection to "Mrs. Rouncewell's boarding house" (26), where Boon lives, and there are men named Rouncewell in both The Town and The Mansion he could be, or be related to, but the novel does not make any of those connections explicit.

In The Reivers the man who owns Coppermine (i.e. Lightning) is named van Tosch. He is originally from Chicago, but on a trip to Memphis decided he liked it so much that he moved to Tennessee and became a breeder of race horses. It is because he is "a foreigner" (281) - i.e. from the North - that he does not behave correctly when his black employee, Bobo, asks for money to help him out of trouble. But the narrative treats him favorably as a friend of both Colonel Linscomb and Grandfather.

In The Reivers Vera works as one of the prostitutes at Miss Reba's. Because she is away, "visiting her folks up in Paducah," Boon and Lucius stay in her room (99).

Birdie Watts runs the brothel "across the street" from Miss Reba's in The Reivers (107).

Mr. Wordwin, a cashier at the Bank of Jefferson, plays his small part in The Reivers when he accompanies Boon to Memphis to fetch Grandfather's new car, but the narrative adds that he is "a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town" who has been "a groomsman in thirteen weddings" (30).

This "Mr Wylie" in The Reivers is a "family friend" of the Priests in 1905 (69). He lives on the place "eight miles from Jefferson" that his ancestor, "the first Wylie" in Yoknapatawpha, moved to sometime before the Civil War (69, 73). (In earlier editions of the novel his and his ancestor's name was Wyott.)

In The Reivers Lucius notes in passing that Delphine is the wife Ned has in 1904, and that during his lifetime he "ran through four wives" (31). This entry represents the other three, none of whom are given names, or individualized in any way. The narrative doesn't even indicate Delphine's place in the sequence of four.

This Union soldier in The Reivers is the "picket of Fitz-John Porter's" - i.e. a man on look-out duty as part of Porter's Union division at Gaines's Mill, Virginia - who shot and killed Grandfather Priest's father during the CIvil War (278).

This is the group that Lucius contemptuously refers in The Reivers as the "brutal and shameless men" (155) who pay Otis a dime to watch his aunt, Miss Corrie, "pugnuckling," having sex, with paying customers (154).

When he describes his situation on the verge of launching the forbidden trip to Memphis in The Reivers, Lucius says "I was in the position of the old Negro who said, 'Here I is, Lord. . . ." (62). He (or Faulkner) may have a specific person in mind, but this tempted black man seems more like the product of Lucius' imagination, and a suggestive one at that.

At the time The Reivers begins, Ludus is romancing "a new girl, daughter (or wife: we didn't know which) of a tenant" farmer who lives six miles from town (10). Apparently she likes "peppermint candy" (11).

According to Boon, the Memphis man who sold Grandfather the car in The Reivers said to run the engine every day.

This entry represents the people in The Reivers who are in a "carriage or wagon" when the automobile being driven by Boon moves through the Square (39). Some of these horse- and mule-drawn vehicles have "women and children" in them, and some are being driven by women (39). Grandfather Priest's behavior changes, depending on the gender of the driver, but in either case, both the animals and the people are often startled by the presence of the car.

In The Reivers the people who live in the vicinity of Ballenbaugh's and seek to close it down include "sheriffs" (who campaign on the promise to run Ballenbaugh and his crew out of Yoknapatawpha), "angry farmers" (who know their livestock is being stolen by that crew), and "ministers and old ladies" (who object to the place on moral grounds, 73). On the other hand, Lucius tells his grandson that "sensible people" from further away were willing to allow the place to exist (74).

In The Reivers the driver of the Stanley Steamer that arrives in Parsham to carry Boon and the others back to jail in Hardwick is driven by "another deputy," or at least someone "in a badge" (253).

In The Reivers the Sheriff says that Boon's white friends can "settle" the problem caused by his accidental shooting of a "Negro girl" by "giving her father ten dollars" (15). The father himself does not appear in the text.

In The Reivers the typical patrons at Ballenbaugh's in its modern iteration are described as "fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen" who return "not for the hunting and fishing but for the table that Miss Ballenbaugh set" (74).

In The Reivers Otis mentions the "I-talian wop" who has a "fruit and peanut stand" in Memphis' Court Square (139).

The Reivers doesn't provide much detail about the unscrupulous man who cultivates a patch of mud in order to sell his services to mired automobile travelers. Physically he is "a gaunt man, older than we - I anyway - had assumed" (86).

These are the "liquor dealers," "grocers and coal merchants," "plumbers," "newspaper boy" and other tradesman and laborers with whom Mr. Binford negotiates in The Reivers as part of his responsibilities as the man of the house that Miss Reba runs (111).

These are the "street- and assessment commissioners" with whom Mr. Binford negotiates and the policemen he pays off as part of his responsibilities as the man of Miss Reba's house in The Reivers (111).

In The Reivers Lucius compares the "females" of his childhood to the ones alive "now" (191). According to what he has heard, modern women not only "run in and out of gentlemen's rooms in hotels" - they do so wearing "the shorts or scanties" that seem to be the uniform of "their fight for freedom" (191).

According to Ned in The Reivers, the "hollow" where they "stable" Lightning before and between races is on land "that belongs to one of Possum's [Parsham's] church members" (217).

When Lucius and Lycurgus enter Linscomb's stable in The Reivers they see "a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear" (220).

After Ballenbaugh takes over Wyott's store in The Reivers, it becomes a stop-over place for the "hard-mouthed hard-souled" men who carry merchandise to and from Memphis (72). But until the 1870s the people at Ballenbaugh's were "just tough men," i.e. no women (72). When the railroad took over the freight traffic in the 1880s, however, Ballenbaugh's becomes a destination point.

When they cross the Tallahatchie River in The Reivers, the adventurers are in what Lucius calls "foreign country, another county," the county that adjoins Yoknapatawpha to the north (78). Between Ballenbaugh's and Hell Creek bottom the countryside seems rural: along the road are "sprouting fields" (78). Lucius describes the residents they pass as "the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs . . . running toward the fence" to watch an automobile go by (78).

One of the two "ladies, girls" whom Lucius sees at supper in Miss Reba's in The Reivers (106). Lucius distinguishes them by their clothes - one wears "a red dress," and the other is "in pink" - and their age: one is a "girl" and the other is "no longer a girl" (106-07). This is "the older one," whom Lucius feels a kind of pity for: "There was something wrong about her . . . She was alone. . . . she shouldn't have had to be here, alone, to have to go through this" (107). Exactly what the 11-year-old Lucius means by "this" is not specified, but Mr.

On the morning of the first horse race in The Reivers, Lucius sees "seven or eight people, all men," in the hotel dining room (209). Lucius refers to them as "people like us except that they lived" in and around Parsham; "some were in overalls; all but one were tieless" (209-10). Later he calls them "aficionados," in reference to their passion for horse racing (220). The one wearing a tie is one of the two men who talk with Boon about the upcoming race.

In The Reivers Lucius notes that "two other men" are waiting with Sam and the conductor beside the train that is going to carry the horse to Parsham; this is the one that, according to him, "must have been the engineer" (161).

The other residents of the boarding house where Boon lives in The Reivers are described as "juries" who were in town "during court terms," "country litigants" also in town for court, and "horse- and mule-traders" (25).

In The Reivers the "street car" conductor the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the motorman (93).