Character Keys

In The Mansion Mink sees "a few Negroes" shopping - "trafficking" is the word the narrative uses - in "the small dingy store" in Memphis where he buys animal crackers (319).

The first of two unnamed Negro drivers in The Sound and the Fury. Jason pays him to bring his car to a back street in Jefferson.

The family of the Negro farmer who owns the "scrub bull" in The Mansion watches Mink as he curses them out (9).

The oldest of the "three pickaninnies" who live with their parents in the lonely cabin where Young Bayard spends Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in Flags in the Dust; she wears "greasy, nondescript garments, her wool twisted into tight knots of soiled wisps of colored cloth" (364).

When Chick sees lights in Gavin Stevens' office in Intruder in the Dust, he thinks that sometimes "the janitor forgot to turn them off" (207).

The mammy who takes care of Narcissa and Bayard's new-born son at the end of Flags in the Dust is referred to only as "the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours" (395).

In "Smoke" Granby Dodge sends this man to ascertain from Gavin Stevens “if the way in which a man died could affect the probation of his will” (36).

According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel.

The unnamed man whom "Red Leaves" calls "Issetibbeha's body servant" - though there is never any ambiguity about the fact that he is owned as a slave by the Choctaw chief - is the short story's central character, Faulkner's earliest non-white protagonist. According to tribal custom, after Issetibbeha's death he must be killed and buried too; the story's main action focuses on his thoughts and actions as he attempts to escape this fate. Although he is not given a name, the story does give him a biography.

The men whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to as "the steamboat slaves" (367, 378) are the deckhands and firemen who do the physical work on board Captain Studenmare's riverboat.

In "Raid" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this former slave is among the group allocated to Rosa Millard by the Union Lieutenant. He is identified only as a stranger to her, Bayard and Ringo. He steps forward to drive the wagon when the Lieutenant asks for someone who can handle "two span" of mules (53, 111).

In "An Error in Chemistry" this "strange Negro youth" (129) is sitting in the driver's seat of Wesley Pritchel's truck as the disguised Joel Flint prepares to sell the property and leave. "Strange" in this context almost certainly means 'not from Yoknapatawpa.' The youth has presumably been hired by Flint to drive the truck.

Referred to in "Barn Burning" only as the "third man" along with Ab Snopes and the unnamed blacksmith, he "squat[s] on his heels" in rural fashion while taking part in their unnarrated, desultory conversation about "crops and animals" (19).

This youth shouts "Barn burner!" at Ab Snopes after his trial as he leaves the general store with his two sons (5). From Sarty's perspective, this boy appears as "a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon," and though the boy is "half again his size," Sarty attacks him (5-6).

These men in "Barn Burning" sit atop or stand along the "tall rail fence" beside the horse lot next to the general store and blacksmith's shop, where they spend the Saturday afternoon unhurriedly "swapping and buying" horses (20).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (70, 71; 206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (70, 206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers carpetbaggers, the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin sees this "old man eating something out of a paper bag" (112) when he gets off the interurban car in the town near Cambridge. When he passes the same spot later he notes that the man is gone.

In both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished these unnamed people, from various places and social ranks in the county, make up the white portion of the 'congregation' that assembles in the Episcopal Church to hear Rosa confess her sins - her campaign of stealing from the Yankees - and to enjoy the fruits of those sins, the mules and money she disperses into the community.

In Light in August, when Hightower walks home after learning that the Sheriff is closing in on Christmas, he is so shaken that when "someone speaks to him in passing," he "does not even know" that he has been addressed (310). There's no indication of the gender of this passerby, but it's unlikely that a black would speak first in passing a white man, so we identify 'him' as white.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. "A Bear Hunt" distinguishes the unnamed townspeople from the people who live in the country.

This is the "someone in the Square" in "My Grandmother Millard" whom the Yankee officer asks "where General Compson lives" (675).

In "Wash" and again in Absalom! this is the group of armed white men who ride out with the sheriff to the shack where Wash lives to arrest him. They arrive as night falls, so Wash sees them mainly as moving shadows, but in his mind, at least, they are felt to be "men of Sutpen's own kind," the aristocratic leaders of the plantation South, the "arrogant and proud on the fine horses across the fine plantations" whom he had once looked up to, but who now seem to him not just "symbols of admiration and hope," but also "instruments of despair and grief" (547, 232).

This is the "express clerk" at the Jefferson railroad station in "Knight's Gambit" (255).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished there is a large group of Negroes who sought freedom with the Union army but who are turned over to Rosa Millard because of a clerical error. They are part of a much larger group of self-emancipated slaves, to Bayard it "looks like a thousand" (52, 110), who are waiting beside the pile of confiscated chests and the pen full of confiscated mules when Rosa Millard presents the faulty requisition order that calls for "110 Negroes of both sexes" to be "repossessed" to her (54, 112).

Although the narrator of "Centaur in Brass" says that "we" often saw Mrs. Snopes working in her husband's restaurant, he later suggests that most of the customers there were men from the surrounding countryside. Major Hoxey eats there, but he looks out of place "among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces" of the other diners (151).

Among the various kinds of jailed prisoners mentioned in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are "runaway slaves who were captured in the settlement" (202, 6). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story does not say where these slaves escaped from. Instead, it notes that the "single wooden bar" across the door of the jail effectively keeps them from escaping again (202, 6).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's grotesque childhood is set against the normal lives of other Jefferson children, "all the boys and girls" who go to school (372) and who run, for example, "with random shouts back and forth at recess" (371). As they grow up, these children "fall into inevitable pairs," courting and marrying (374).

In both "The Unvanquished" and the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished Granny passes this unnamed sentry en route to her encounter with Colonel Newberry.

The sheriff never appears in "Dry September," but is mentioned by Hawkshaw when he tries to prevent the lynching: "Let's get the sheriff and do this thing right" (172). (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions. Obviously in some of these cases - at least when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment - Faulkner may be thinking of the same unnamed character, or one of the half dozen "Sheriff Hampton"s who also appear in the fictions, but from the texts themselves there is no way to establish that.)

As at Ab Snopes' first (criminal) trial, at the second (civil) trial in "Barn Burning," in a second country store, there is again a crowd of men in attendance. Their faces this time are described as "quiet, watching" (17).

In As I Lay Dying, Anse's mother is mentioned in passing by Doctor Peabody. As he climbs the steep slope up to the Bundren house, Peabody wonders "how his mother ever got up to birth him" (42).

Dewey Dell is the fourth child and only daughter of Addie and Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying. Cora Tull calls her a "tom-boy girl" (8); several male characters comment on how "pretty" she is, "in a kind of sullen, awkward way" (199). Unknown to anyone but her brother Darl and Lafe, her sexual partner, she is pregnant and wants to go to Jefferson to get an abortion. She is able to communicate with Darl without words and she narrates four chapters in the novel.

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman is the fifth and youngest child of Anse and Addie Bundren. He narrates ten chapters in which we follow the progression of a child's grieving process after the death of a parent. He also reveals poignant and specific examples of the poverty in which he resides. He is described by the other narrators as very small. (Vardaman is named after James K. Vardaman, who served one term each as Mississippi's Governor [1904-1908] and Senator [1913-1919]; he was a militant white supremacist whom his supporters called "The Great White Chief.")

In As I Lay Dying "Mr. Gillespie's boy" Mack helps his father and the Bundrens move Addie's coffin into the barn, and then later works to help save the Gillespies' livestock from the fire in the barn (216). During the fireVardaman notes that his legs "fuzz" in the moonlight (216).

In As I Lay Dying Gillespie is a farmer who lives between Mottson and Jefferson. He agrees to let the Bundrens stop for the night on his property, but when his barn burns down as a result he threatens to sue the family unless they have Darl committed to Jackson - the Mississippi state mental institution.

Along with Skeets MacGowan, Jody works as a clerk in Jefferson's drugstore in As I Lay Dying. He serves as a lookout for MacGowan when he is seducing Dewey Dell.

In As I Lay Dying Miss Lawington is the lady in Jefferson who tells Cora Tull about another lady who needs cakes for a party. The fact that the Tulls put "Miss" in front of her name suggests her higher class status (7).

Moseley is the Mottson pharmacist who lectures Dewey Dell when she comes to his drug store seeking an abortion. He narrates one chapter in the novel and tells us that he is "a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years" (202).

This is the woman in As I Lay Dying who was going to have a party for which Cora made cakes; when she calls off the party, Cora is left holding the cakes. Cora's daughter Kate describes her, with some bitterness, as one of "those rich town ladies [who] can change their minds," though we have no direct evidence about her social status (7).

The officer in "My Grandmother Millard" who leads the "first Yankee scouting party" to appear in Jefferson is obviously a gentleman: when told by Aunt Roxanne, one of the Compson's slaves, that a woman is in the privy behind the Compson house, he begs Roxanne's pardon, "raises his hat and even backs [his] horse a few steps" before turning away and ordering his men to leave (675).

The man who was Addie Bundren's father is mentioned in only two paragraphs in As I Lay Dying. We learn from several sources that Addie's "people" lived in Jefferson (171), though we are not given any idea where or what their family name was. We are also told that by the time she meets Anse Bundren, all Addie's family are now buried "in the cemetery" in town (171). Her father is the one member of this family who is individuated, though he exists in the novel only as a voice that she remembers saying "that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead" a long time (175).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, this is the Union soldier who was captured by the Confederate unit camped outside Jefferson; according to its captain, this prisoner was sure that Sartoris had more than a thousand men in his troop.

In both "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this sergeant serving in the Union cavalry unit Rosa Millard encounters in Alabama objects to his young Lieutenant's decision to honor the requisition she carries.

In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, this is the first group of Yankee soldiers to appear in Yoknapatawpha. In "Raid" Louvinia remembers their arrival, and Rosa's note to their colonel identifies them as a regiment from Ohio. To Ringo they look like "the whole [Union] army" (10), but it's more likely they comprise a single regiment of cavalry - or less.

This second set of Yankees described in "My Grandmother Millard" seems to be an irregular, possibly even a renegade group: the "six men in blue" who charge on horseback onto the Sartoris property (676). They are armed with a battering ram because their mission is pillage rather than combat (674). Bayard describes their "faces" as "unshaven and wan" and their demeanor as "frantically gleeful"; their slovenliness suggests a lower class background and their glee an undisciplined lust for plunder (676).

These are the Union forces serving under General Smith in "My Grandmother Millard" who retreat ignobly in the face of a charge by a much smaller Confederate unit led by Lieutenant Backhouse. It's not clear how large Smith's unit is, but it includes the "outpost" that Backhouse attacks, a "main unit," and a troop of "cavalry" who screen the retreat (692).

In Intruder in the Dust Lucas commissions "a white boy . . . on a mule" to carry the gallon bucket of molasses he is giving Chick into town (22).

These are "the white men" from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon, a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) in Absalom!, deliberately provokes a racial reaction: they refuse to believe he was "a negro," believing instead that his relationship with her proves that he was "besotted" by "sexual perversion" (167).

This character is created in "That Evening Sun" by Mr. Compson, either because of his assumptions about someone like Jesus, or because he desires to reassure Nancy that Jesus won't return; she is the new wife that Jesus has married in St Louis (295).