Character Keys

In The Mansion this "Four-F potato chip salesman" ran off with Mrs. Goodyhay while Goodyhay himself was serving in World War II (294).

The story "Skirmish at Sartoris" briefly acknowledges the many enslaved people who sought freedom by emancipating themselves as the Union Army passed through Mississippi. Groups of these people, and a few of them as individuals, are described in some detail in the earlier story "Raid." The chapter "Skirmish at Sartoris" in the novel The Unvanquished revises the reference in "Skirmish" to the "Negroes" who "passed in the road [beside Hawkhurst] all night long" (59) as "the niggers passing in the road" at night (189).

In "A Justice," "the People" is the collective term for Doom's tribal members, and they are differentiated from "the black people" (351, 355). The People as a tribe are also often segregated by gender, as when "all the men sleep in the House" (350), or when on the way to the steamboat, the women walk while the men ride in wagons (351). In this early story the Indians are identified as Choctaws; later Faulkner will consistently refer to the Indians who lived in the land that became Yoknapatawpha as Chickasaws.

The "Pettigrew" in the short story "Beyond" is Judge Allison's attorney and the executor of his will, responsible for making sure that the Judge's last wishes are implemented - though he doesn't seem to do so. In Requiem for a Nun - published almost two decades after "Beyond" - a man named 'Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew' is the source of the name of the town that is the seat of Yoknapatawpha county, but it's not likely Faulkner is consciously thinking of a connection between the characters.

The "Tom" in The Town is a customer at the Sartoris bank who cannot read Colonel Sartoris' handwriting on the loan he is trying to take out (147-148).

In both "Lion" and Go Down, Moses, the passengers on the train from Memphis to Hoke’s are “buttonholed” by Boon (188, 222), forced to listen to him talk about Lion, and too intimidated to tell him that he is not allowed to drink on the train. (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

According to Gail Hightower's wife in Light in August, the other passengers on the train bringing them to Jefferson look curiously at him as his voice rises while he tells her the story of his grandfather's death (485). (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

In the "white only" cars of three trains that Horace takes during his journey to Oxford in Sanctuary he sees sleeping travelers who lie with throats turned upward "as though waiting the stroke of knives"; when some awaken their "puffy faces" and "dead eyes" evoke "the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust" (168). A crying child is said to be "wailing hopelessly" (168). And the man beside whom Horace finds a seat immediately "leans forward and spits tobacco juice between his knees" (168).

In Flags in the Dust Minnie Sue is a young woman in Frenchman's Bend whom Byron Snopes has courted in the past, and whom he "paws" in a sordid attempt at sex on his flight from town after robbing the bank (281). She seems unfazed by his behavior, though she is also unaccommodating, ordering him to "come back tomorrer, when you git over this" (281).

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, these are the "two strange white men" whom Lucas believes "came in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um" (227, 78).

Two of the Unvanquished stories - "The Unvanquished" (titled "Riposte in Tertio" in the novel) and "Vendee" - refer generically to the Yankee troops after they have left Mississippi: "there ain't a Yankee regiment left," says Ab Snopes in "The Unvanquished" (87, 139). He is wrong, but by the next story they have in fact all moved away to continue fighting elsewhere in the South. In "Vendee," in their absence, Uncle Buck says Grumby's viciousness makes "even the Yankees" look good in comparison (105, 169).

This is the "United States military force" referred to in Requiem for a Nun that "burned the Square and the business district" in Jefferson during the Civil War (37).

In Flags in the Dust and again in "Retreat" both as a short story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union soldiers is captured by Colonel Sartoris. In the first novel he does so single-handedly, but in the next to he has some (involuntary) help from Bayard and Ringo. In those two texts we assume this group is the "column of Yankee infantry" that earlier passes by Bayard and his father's troop hiding in the woods (30, 67).

Specific Union troops who appear in the various stories that Will Falls and Aunt Jenny tell in Flags in the Dust have their own separate entries in the data. This entry represents the unspecified groups of Union soldiers and officers who are mentioned - often with extreme bias - in the novel. For example, the "drunken Yankee generals [who] set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built" that Aunt Jenny refers to (50).

In As I Lay Dying Vernon Tull mentions his father as he recounts his mother's long life and death.

While no Union troops appear directly in "Skirmish at Sartoris," either as a story or as a chapter in The Unvanquished, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (58, 188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (65, 198).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished the group of Union soldiers who help Ringo and Bayard drag Rosa Millard and the wagon on shore after they cross the river are identified as a "Yankee patrol" (51, 108).

These are the Union troops, identified by Drusilla as "a brigade of cavalry" (45, 91), whom Bayard describes at the bridge over the river in "Raid" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished. Some of them are holding the crowd of self-emancipated slaves away from the bridge, others are preparing to blow it up, still others are described as "riding up and down the cliff" above the water or bivouacked "down at the water" (51, 108).

At the "confectionery-lunchroom" called the Shack in Sanctuary, the "man in a soiled apron" who brings fixings to Gowan may be the owner as well as a waiter and cook (33). Gowan calls him "Cap" (short for captain?), but since he has never been to the Shack before that is obviously a generic name.

In Go Down, Moses this waiter works in the Memphis restaurant where Ike and Boon stop before returning to the hunting camp.

In "Death Drag" this is one of the first people to arrive at the airfield after the plane appears over town. The fact that he arrives in a wagon and not a car suggests that he might be a farmer.

In Absalom! Wash Jones recruits this person - identified only as "another white man" (121) - to help with Charles Bon's burial.

These characters are created by an implication in "That Evening Sun." When Mr. Compson tells Nancy that she should "just let white men alone" (295), he suggests that Mr. Stovall may not be the only white man with whom she has had sex. So by that implication, these are the other men who buy sex from Nancy.

Wilkie is mentioned by Mrs. Bland in The Sound and the Fury, when she tells the young people in her car about Gerald's grandfather back in Kentucky who insisted on picking "his own mint" for his juleps: "He wouldn't even let old Wilkie touch it" (148). It seems safe to say that Wilkie was a servant in the Bland family.

The architect who designs the mansion and grounds at Sutpen's Hundred is identified in Absalom! as "French," but in this novel he comes to Yoknapatawpha from the French Caribbean: "all the way from Martinique" (26). When he is mentioned again in Requiem for a Nun he is identified as the "tame Parisian architect" (30).

In Requiem for a Nun the "architect who designed" the Confederate monument that sits at the center of Jefferson is referred to but not described (189).

The narrator of Flags in the Dust notes that the Benbow house in Jefferson, and its large lawn and drive, were designed by "an English architect of the '40s" (e.g. the 1840s, 163). In other texts, the Old Frenchman place in the county was designed by an English architect at about the same time, but there's no indication that it was the same man.

In Requiem for a Nun, the "Bailiff" who commands "Order in the court!" in the play's brief first scene is not described at all (41). Our assumptions about his gender, race and class are based on the bailiffs who appear in courtrooms in other Yoknapatawpha fictions. We also assume that the "MAN'S VOICE" that opens the play, telling "the prisoner" from behind the theatrical curtain to "stand," also belongs to this Bailiff (38).

In The Hamlet this bailiff tries to serve Flem his papers for a court appearance and is baffled when Flem refuses to acknowledge the suit against him (355).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, this bandit is part of the gang that is brought to the settlement; he claims that the sergeant who commanded the militia unit that captured him was "a former follower of his, the bandit's, trade" (5, 201).

In "That Evening Sun," Mr. Stovall, the cashier in the Jefferson bank and "a deacon in the Baptist church," knocks Nancy to the ground and "kicks her in the mouth" when she accuses him of having failed to pay her for sex (291). In Requem for a Nun, where Nancy reappears as a major character, Temple Drake re-tells this event; she does not name the man, but refers to him as a "pillar of the church" (96).

In Light in August, this cashier brings the sheriff the envelope that Joanna Burden deposited at the bank, addressed by her "To to be opened at my death" (294).

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple Drake's account of the confrontation between Nancy and the cashier mentions that "fifty people" were waiting to get into the bank when it happened (96).

The "teller" at the Bank of Jefferson assists Ike McCaslin and Lucas Beauchamp when Lucas collects his inheritance from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (106).

In Sanctuary the local Baptist minister uses Lee Goodwin's evil ways as the occasion for a sermon. According to the report Horace heard, Lee was condemned "not only as a murderer" but for having a child "begot in sin" (128).

In "Knight's Gambit," the Jefferson barber who joins the conversation about Gualdres' blind horse is "a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly" (178).

One of the two other barbers in Hawkshaw's shop in "Dry September"; he asks, "You reckon [Will Mayes] really done it to her?" (173).

In "Hair" these customers gossip about Hawkshaw and Susan Reed as they are shaved by Mr. Maxey and Matt.

When Tug Nightingale attacks Skeets Magowan in the barbershop in The Mansion, "it takes all the barbers and customers and loafers" to subdue him (209). As the term "loafers" here indicates, the barbershop was one of the places in Jefferson where idling males congregated.

In "Barn Burning," Ab Snopes has his wagon worked on at the blacksmith shop across the road from the story's second general store. However, all we see the smith himself doing is "talking or listening" with Snopes and "a third man," about "crops and animals" and Snopes' earlier life as a horsetrader (19).

In The Town the all-male transient residents of the Snopes Hotel are described by Gavin as "itinerant cattle drovers and horse- and mule-traders" who are in Jefferson on business and "juries and important witnesses" who stay there "during court term" (41). According to Gavin, these patrons are "incarcerated, boarded and fed" (41).

In The Mansion this man, "one of the book-keepers" at Snopes's bank, lets Gavin Stevens in when he goes there after hours to warn Flem about Mink (416).

The second set of "book-keepers" mentioned in The Town are women: two "girl book-keepers" employed by the Sartoris bank. Like the others on the staff, they receive "coca colas" at the bank's three o'clock closing hour (323).

In "Vendee" and then again in The Unvanquished this boy, along with his mother, is a victim of Grumby. Described by Bayard as "almost as big as Ringo and me," the boy is "unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces" after he was brutally whipped by Grumby and his men (102, 164).

In The Hamlet this fourteen-year-old boy has a "habit" of spying on Will Varner's affair with a tenant's wife; he reveals that "Varner would not even remove his hat" during their trysts (157).

These are the British officers whom Chick refers to in Intruder in the Dust when he reminds his uncle Gavin what he once told him, "about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918" (200).

These are the "two or three bystanders" on the street in The Reivers who help the sheriff subdue Boon after he shoots at Ludus (14).

In its brief summation of the experience of Jackson, Mississippi, during Reconstruction Requiem for a Nun evokes the stereotypical bogeyman of the Yankee carpetbagger. According to this account, during the Civil War these men made profits from selling the Union military "spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules"; after the surrender they came South carrying "carpet bags stuffed with ballot-forms" to exploit the freedmen (87). During Reconstruction they "cover the South like a migration of locusts" (187).

Like the women and old men in "Red Leaves," the tribe's children do not go out in pursuit of the fugitive slave.