Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
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2792 | Unnamed Biracial Sister of Sickymo |
She is the mistress of a federal official in Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction, a connection that leads to her brother’s installation as a marshal in Jefferson. She is described in Go Down, Moses as "half-white" (277). |
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2791 | Unnamed Restaurant Manager 2 |
Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222). |
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2790 | Unnamed Real Estate Speculators |
In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for causing the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the wildcat manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites" (273). |
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2789 | Unnamed Politicians and Orators |
In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men outside the South who, according to him, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery. |
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2788 | Unnamed Crop Duster 1 |
In Go Down, Moses this pilot dusts the crops to kill insects on the fields that make up the Edmonds plantation - except for the plot farmed by Lucas Beauchamp. |
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2787 | Unnamed People in Downtown Memphis 2 |
The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis in Go Down, Moses are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221). |
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2786 | Unnamed People in Chancellor's Office |
"There were a few people going in and out of the office; a few inside, not many" on the day that Roth Edmonds takes Molly Beauchamp to seek a divorce from Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses (122). |
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2785 | Unnamed Parents of Rider |
This couple appears in "Pantaloon in Black" as a story and again as a chapter in Go Down, Moses only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt. |
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2784 | Unnamed Spectators at Indian Mound |
In Go Down, Moses these "men women and children come at some time during the day and look quietly on" as the archaeologists investigate the Indian mound (37). |
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2783 | Unnamed Northern Laborers |
Ike's account of U.S. history in Go Down, Moses divides the North during the Civil War era into the capitalist class and the workers. That second group is who is represented by this entry: "the New England mechanics who didn't even own land," the factory workers who lived in "rented tenements," and so on (273). |
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2782 | Unnamed Children of Mrs. McCaslin's Sister|Niece |
As a widower, in "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin lives in a house in Jefferson with members of his dead wife's family. The short story identifies the woman in that "family" as his wife's niece and says nothing about the rest of them (274). The novel calls her Ike's "sister-in-law" at the beginning of the novel (6) and his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), and identifies the rest of the "family" as her children. |
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2781 | Unnamed Negro Field Workers |
In its account of the position Sam Fathers occupies on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation, Go Down, Moses mentions the tenant farmers who "farmed allotted acres" but also acknowledges the existence of the men who do "field-work for daily wages" (161). However, although wage labor was replacing tenantry in parts of the South, no such salaried field-workers appear in the novel. |
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2780 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 4 |
In it clearly implied in Go Down, Moses that the labor on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is supplied by Negro tenant farmers. They don't appear in the novel, but when Lucas sees the sun coming up he thinks that in "another hour . . . every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it" (40). Like the fields, these mules belong to Roth Edmonds. |
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2779 | Unnamed Negro Carriage Driver 2 |
In Go Down, Moses the servant who drives Major de Spain's coach is the man who lends Boon the gun he used to shoot at another Negro. |
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2777 | Unnamed Biracial Woman at Beauchamp Place |
This young woman who lives in the Beauchamp big house after Emancipation in Go Down, Moses, with skin "even lighter in color than Tomey’s Terrel," is identified by Hubert Beauchamp as his cook (288); however, his sister Sophonsiba is almost certainly right to suspect that she is also his mistress. In response to Sophonsiba's accusation that this woman's presence "defiles" their home, Hubert exclaims "They’re folks too just like we are!" (288). |
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2776 | Unnamed Men Who Live in the Big Bottom |
In Go Down, Moses various combinations of the "gaunt, malaria-ridden" men who live in the wildest parts of the big woods (210) appear in throughout the year to look at the dog named Lion while Sam is training him. Many of them feel invested in the hunt for Old Ben, since the bear often raided their crops and attacked their livestock. |
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2775 | Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 3 |
In Go Down, Moses the named men from town who come into the woods to be part of the hunt for Old Men are Bayard and John Sartoris and Jason Compson, but the group also includes these two unnamed men. |
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2774 | Unnamed Men in Search Party |
In addition to Roth Edmonds, Oscar, Dan, Lucas Beauchamp, George and Nat Wilkins, the search party that goes looking for Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses includes at least two additional characters, simply referred to first as "some others" and then as "another man" (120). The race of these people is not indicated, which in Faulkner's fiction usually means someone is white. Elsewhere in the novel, however, it is clear that the only white man who lives on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is Roth, which explains why we identify these 'other men' as 'Negro.' |
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2773 | Unnamed Logging Train Engineer |
This "engine-driver" blows the whistle at two different points in Go Down, Moses: after stopping the train on its first run, to scare away the young bear investigating the tracks (303); and to let Ike know they are approaching the area of the hunting camp (306). |
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2772 | Unnamed Loggers |
These unarmed loggers who join the hunt for Old Ben in Go Down, Moses travel thirteen miles to get to Major de Spain’s camp. |
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2771 | Unnamed Victims of the Ku Klux Klan |
During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' account of it in Go Down, Moses, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277). |
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2770 | Unnamed Veteran Klansman |
Only one member of the Ku Klux Klan has any individual existence in "By the People" or The Mansion: a "veteran ranking Klansman" who seems to accept defeat at the hands of the "schoolteachers and editors and Sunday School superintendents" who elected Clarence Snopes as their champion (131, 333). |
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2769 | Unnamed Members of Ku Klux Klan 1 |
As part of the account in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, these white men "armed in sheets and masks" who terrorize freed blacks are described (277). The details of the description suggests the Ku Klux Klan, especially "formalized regalia of hooded sheets" and "fiery christian symbols" (276), but this group is never given a label. And astonishingly, the narrator suggests that its original founders were the descendants of the carpetbaggers from the North, lynching "the race their ancestors had come to save" (276). |
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2768 | Unnamed Group of Young Negroes |
One of Roth Edmonds' grievances against Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses is that, when he would speak to the white man in the presence of "a group of young negroes," he would "lump" black and white "all together as 'you boys'" (112). |
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2767 | Unnamed Grandfather of Will Legate |
When Ike tells the younger hunters in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses about the old days "when I first started hunting in this bottom," he mentions that among the men who hunted with him was "Will Legate's" grandfather (328). |
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2766 | Unnamed Frightened Women and Children |
As part of his description in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, Ike McCaslin imagines "women crouched with huddled children behind locked doors," seeking shelter from threats that are not named in the text, but are clearly meant to be understood as a consequence of the defeat of the (white) South and the emancipation of the (black) South (277). |
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2765 | Unnamed Friends of Roth Edmonds |
Roth Edmonds meets with these unnamed friends after church in "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses; their farm is eight miles from the Edmonds plantation. |
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2764 | Unnamed Federal Army Provost Marshal 1 |
An A[rmy] P[rovost] M[arshal] is the head of a unit of military police. This "Federal A.P.M." in Go Down, Moses is one of the Yankee troops who are stationed in Mississippi as part of the post-war Reconstruction (277). He has a black mistress, the sister of Sickymo, which is why he ensures that Sickymo is made a marshal in Jefferson. |
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2763 | Unnamed Father-in-Law of Ike McCaslin |
In Go Down, Moses this "bank president," who tells Ike about the bank account in Ike's name that Cass Edmonds has been paying money into (295), is certainly not Bayard Sartoris, who is also a Jefferson bank president at the time of the novel. This "bank president" is never named, but although the text is not explicit, it seems likely that he is the father of the woman - also never named - whom Ike marries. |
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2761 | Unnamed Ex-Slaves of Carothers McCaslin |
The three paragraph introductory to Go Down, Moses says that "some of the descendants" of the former McCaslin slaves are named McCaslin (5), but curiously no such characters appear in the rest of the story. There the family name of the many people who are descendants of Carothers McCaslin and his slaves is Beauchamp. (There are some of these descendants named McCaslin in The Reivers, published twenty years after Moses.) |
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2760 | Unnamed County Clerk |
In both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses the signature of this "nameless clerk" appears on the marriage license for George Wilkins and Nat Beauchamp (221, 70). |
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2759 | Unnamed Negro Cook 8 |
The black woman who cooks Roth's food does not appear directly in Go Down, Moses, but he does speak to her "through the kitchen door" when he wants her to bring Lucas into the house (125). |
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2758 | Unnamed Chancellor |
The Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse in Go Down, Moses hears the divorce petition that Roth Edmonds has put forth for Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is described as “quite old” (123). |
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2757 | Unnamed Boarding House Tenants 2 |
After Ike renounces his inheritance in Go Down, Moses, he and his wife live for a time in a boarding house in Jefferson whose other tenants are described as "petit juries," countrymen in town to serve as jurors "during court terms," and "itinerant horse- and mule-traders" (285). |
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2756 | Unnamed Enslaved Man at Beauchamps |
In the "Was" chapter of Go Down, Moses, this unnamed member of the group of slaves who are part of the hunt for Tomey’s Turl is the one who returns to the big house to fetch a fyce, whiskey, and a "piece of red ribbon that had been on Miss Sophonsiba's neck" that she sends to Buck (17). |
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2755 | Unnamed Bank President 2 |
In Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin meets with this man in the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time. He is describe as a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like Ike's father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War (267). |
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2754 | Unnamed Authors of the Bible |
The first time Ike refers to the Bible in Go Down, Moses, he talks about it as the word of God: "He told in the Book," etc. (243). But when Cass challenges him on the subject of race in the Bible, repeating the familiar pro-slavery argument that the enslaved Africans were the accursed "sons of Ham" (246), Ike introduces the idea of "the men who wrote His Book for Him" (246), i.e. the human authors who "transcribed His Words," and often misquoted Him, or misrepresented His will, despite their desire to "write down the heart's truth" (247). |
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2753 | Unnamed Aunt of Nat Beauchamp |
This "aunt" (68) in Vicksburg whom Nat visits in Go Down, Moses is only mentioned once, when Nat tells Roth Edmonds about her trip. Based on the rest of the novel, it's hard to know how this aunt is related to either of Nat's parents, Molly or Lucas. |
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2752 | Unnamed Assistant to Judge Gowan |
Judge Gowan's assistant in Go Down, Moses is described as a “young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses” (70). |
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2751 | Unnamed Archaeologists 1 |
The archaeologists mentioned in Go Down, Moses are "a group of white men, including two women," who descend on the Indian mound to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37). |
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2750 | Unnamed "Hunters" |
These "hunters" are created by the narrator at the start of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, when he defines "hunters" as a exalted category of its own, a quasi-spiritual group, men who are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181). Distinguished also from "women," "boys," and "children," hunters tell stories about hunting while drinking liquor "in salute to" their prey (181-82). Even the camp cooks, however, are "hunters first and cooks afterward" (185). |
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2749 | Henry Wyatt |
In the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses Wyatt joins Will Legate, Roth Edmonds, and Ike McCaslin and some other men from Yoknapatawpha on the hunting trip to the Delta. There are five other 'Wyatts' in four other Yoknapatawpha fictions, but how or if Henry is related to any of them is never mentioned. |
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2748 | The Jew |
Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277). |
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2747 | Sickymo |
Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War. |
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2746 | Mr. Semmes |
In Go Down, Moses Semmes is a distiller in Memphis to whom Boon and Ike are sent by Major de Spain for whisky during the annual hunting trip. |
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2745 | Doctor Rideout |
He is the doctor consulted in Go Down, Moses after Molly Beauchamp is found unconscious along the creek (120). |
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2744 | Sally Rand |
Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323). |
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2743 | General George Meade |
George Meade was given command of the Army of the Potomac just three days before the battle of Gettysburg, site of the charge by Pickett's confederate troops which proved to be a decisive defeat for the Confederate cause. In Go Down, Moses, Cass is referring to that defeat when he notes, somewhat obscurely, that Jeb Stuart and his cavalry troops were not at the battle, "when Lee should have known of all of Meade just where Hancock was on Cemetery Ridge" (272). |
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2742 | Jonas |
Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9). |
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2741 | Hulett |
In Go Down, Moses Hulett works for the Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse, whom Roth Edmonds and Mollie Beauchamp visit regarding a petition for divorce for the Beauchamps. He makes several sharp remarks concerning racial decorum and Lucas’s "uppity" failure to observe it (124). |
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2740 | Hancock, General Winfield Scott |
General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom Cass Edmonds mentions in Go Down, Moses as part of his argument with Ike McCaslin about God's role in Southern history (271), was a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and as Cass notes, "on Cemetery Ridge" at Gettysburg (272). |
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2739 | God Whom Ike McCaslin Describes |
In the 4th section of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, during his long conversation with his cousin Cass about the history of the world with particular reference to the Old and New South and Ike's own belief that he must relinquish his inheritance from the past, Ike has a lot to say about God - as both the author of the Bible and the providential force behind human events. Ike most frequently refers to this divinity as "He," always capitalizing the H (243, etc). |
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2738 | Phoebe |
In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin" inherited and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849. |
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2737 | Daisy |
Daisy is mentioned in Go Down, Moses by Major de Spain when he tells Ike that Ash would be glad to go into the woods, "where he won't have to eat Daisy's cooking" (301). It seems clear that like Ash, Daisy works for the Major as a cook, and it becomes likely that she is Ash's wife when De Spain adds "complain about it" - her cooking - "anyway" (301). |
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2736 | Percival Brownlee |
In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278). |
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2735 | Hubert Beauchamp |
The full name of Ike McCaslin's "Uncle Hubert" in Go Down, Moses, as readers learn when he signs the i.o.u.'s he leaves his nephew instead of a golden treasure, is Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp. The son of the man who built it, he owns the "Warwick" plantation that is half-a-day’s ride from the McCaslin plantation. After the Civil War he takes a black mistress for a while, and then lives with an aged black servant "in one single room" in the decaying mansion (290) until it burns down. |
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2734 | Beauchamp, Ancestors of Hubert and Sophonsiba |
Thinking about his legacy in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to "the ones who sired the Beauchamp who sired Uncle Hubert and his Uncle Hubert's sister" (294). The locution is confusing, in part because "his Uncle Hubert's sister" is in fact Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, as one might expect him to acknowledge. And obviously "the ones who sired" doesn't imply two fathers, but a longer generation of 'sires,' who would include Ike's great-grandfather and earlier male ancestors. |
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2733 | Beauchamp, Father of Hubert and Sophonsiba |
Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294). |
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2732 | Aunt Thisbe |
When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the only reference to Thisbe in Go Down, Moses, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household. |
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2731 | Turner Ashby |
Turner Ashby led a cavalry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. The historical event Cass refers to in Go Down, Moses - how "by chance" Turner Ashby lost and the Union army found "Lee's battle-order" for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion of the North in 1862 - is a famous piece of Civil War history; the order itself, Special Order 191, is often referred to as the 'Lost Dispatch' or the 'Lost Order' (272). Ashby himself was killed in combat in 1862. |
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2730 | Unnamed Sons of Farmers |
In "The Bear" the narrative notes that "in April" school is always let out "so that the sons of farmers could help with the land's planting" (291). |
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2729 | John Keats |
John Keats, the author of the poem quoted in both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years. |
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2728 | Unnamed Slaves in Delta |
Both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses briefly describe the process by which generations of planters created the plantation agriculture of the Delta. Before the Civil War it was these "gangs of slaves" who provided the labor force which turned the wilderness into cotton fields (270, 323). |
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2727 | Unnamed Planters |
Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses briefly trace the process by which several generations of planters, the white men who own the land, turned the wilderness into fields, using the labor of "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and "hired labor" ever since (270, 323). |
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2726 | Unnamed People of This Delta |
In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin has vividly creates an image the diverse group of human beings that he thinks of as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down (279, 346). It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed" together (279, 346). |
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2725 | Unnamed Youngest Negro in Delta Camp |
In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339). |
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2724 | Unnamed Biracial Woman 1 |
The character of the unnamed woman with whom Don Boyd has had an affair and a child in "Delta Autumn" comes into focus slowly. At the start of the story she is referred to elliptically as the "doe" whom Boyd hunted the year before (268). When she appears before Ike in person at the end of the story, she brings with her "something intangible" (277). She is wearing a man's hat and rain coat, and has "a face young" with "dark eyes" (268). She tells Ike she is a teacher. |
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2723 | Unnamed Mississippi Indians 1 |
In both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the texts briefly mention the Indians who once inhabited Mississippi. As the "successors" of the aboriginal inhabitants, they turned the aboriginals' raised refuges from the water into burial mounds, which suggests their inevitable historical fate: all that is left of these Indians in the present are their words as the names of "the little towns" along the river (271, 325). |
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2722 | Unnamed Hired Delta Farm Workers |
Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses note that after slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270, 323-24). |
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2721 | Unnamed Sister|Niece of Mrs. McCaslin |
In "Delta Autumn," this woman, Ike McCaslin's "dead wife's niece," lives in his house in Jefferson with her children and looks after him during the fifty weeks of the year he is not in the woods (274). In Go Down, Moses this same woman is called his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), but in the first mention of her, in the very beginning of the novel, she is "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" (6). Faulkner either mis-remembered the story when he wrote "sister" or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" later. |
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2720 | Unnamed Northern Businessmen 2 |
Ike McCaslin's account of the Civil War in Go Down, Moses juxtaposes the leaders of the Confederate cause with the various Yankees who opposed them. This entry represents his roster of the economic elite in northern and western states that didn't secede: "the wildcat manipulators" and land speculators, "the bankers," the landlords and factory owners (273). |
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2719 | Unnamed Negro Father of Young Woman |
All we know about the father of the young woman who has given birth to Don Boyd's child in "Delta Autumn" is that he lived in Indianapolis and died "two years ago" (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses he made the young woman's family part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, and so although he made no changes in the way this father is described, radically re-positioned him in the larger Yoknapatawpha narrative; for that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.) |
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2718 | Unnamed Confederate Leaders |
In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, McCaslin refers to the men who led the Confederacy in the Civil War as the "group of men . . . inside" the U.S. who "tried to tear the country in two with a war" (269, 322). He calls these men "better men" than "Hitler" and "Pelley" (in the story, 269) or "Hitler," "Roosevelt or Wilkie" (in the novel, 322), but seems glad that "they failed" (269, 322). |
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2717 | Unnamed Aboriginals 1 |
"Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses describe the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians who lived there until the 19th century (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it. (See also the entry for Unnamed First Aboriginal in the index.) |
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2716 | Yokohama |
"Yokohama" is the name of a city in Japan rather than a person (269). When in "Delta Autumn" Boyd adds the name to the list of dangers the U.S. faces along with, for example, "Hitler," he seems to be using it as a generic (and somewhat racist) way to refer to 'someone from Japan' (269). |
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2715 | Smith and Jones |
"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames. In "Delta Autumn," Don Boyd uses them to suggest how widespread are the contemporary political threats to the U.S. (269). In the revised version of the story that appears in Go Down, Moses, the character who mentions them is Roth Edmonds (322). |
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2714 | William Dudley Pelley |
Mentioned by a character in "Delta Autumn" as one of ominous signs on the horizon of contemporary events (269), William Dudley Pelley was a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter and publisher before making a name for himself a fascist and a religious leader. In 1936 Pelley ran for president as the candidate for the Christian Party, preaching antisemitism and socialism as staples for a new Christian Commonwealth. He supported Hitler's ideology regarding Jews. |
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2713 | Unnamed Partner of Ike McCaslin |
Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike. |
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2712 | Don Boyd |
One of the "sons of [Ike McCaslin's] old [hunting] companions" (268), Boyd is a leader of the party of younger hunters in "Delta Autumn"; he has "the youngest face of them all, darkly aquiline, handsome and ruthless and saturnine" (268). The story reveals his ruthlessness in several ways, beginning with his driving and ending with his abandonment of the woman he had an affair with and the child they conceived together. He seems to think money can settle his moral and emotional debts. |
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2711 | Unnamed Ticket Seller 1 |
In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90). |
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2710 | Unnamed Soldier Who Drives Car |
At the request of Mrs. McKellogg, a soldier driving "a big car" takes the Grier boy home from Memphis in "Two Soldiers" (99). |
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2709 | Unnamed Social Worker |
The younger of two Jefferson women in "Two Soldiers" who take charge of the young Grier boy and help him get to Memphis. She may simply be a concerned member of the community (the "fur coat" she wears suggests a lady rather than a public employee, 91) but she does carry a "hand satchel" with papers in it, and tells the boy "we must have a case history for our files" (91). |
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2708 | Unnamed Radio Newscaster |
"The fellow in the radio talking" - this is how the narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to the announcer who reports on the bombing of Pearl Harbor (81). |
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2707 | Unnamed People in Bus Depot |
The narrator of "Two Soldiers" notes that "more folks" arrive at the Jefferson bus depot and buy tickets for the bus to Memphis that he is waiting to take (92). |
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2706 | Unnamed Negro Elevator Operator |
When Mrs. McKellogg takes the young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" back to what he calls "her house" (obviously, an apartment house, 97), he notes that the "little room without nothing in it" (obviously an elevator) is operated by "a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had" (obviously the operator, 97). With the exception of the narrator's reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the Negro employees of the apartment building provide the story's only (linguistically racist) mention of race. |
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2705 | Unnamed Japanese |
These "Japanese" should be understood to be 'the enemy' that the U.S. in fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two. The young narrator of "Two Soldiers" as well as his mother refer to the people who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84). In the later story "Shall Not Perish," the same narrator, a year older, refers to the country's enemy and the forces responsible for his brother's death as "them Japs" (101). |
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2704 | Unnamed Enlistees |
In "Two Soldiers," when the Grier boy arrives at the place in Memphis where "folks join the Army" (9) - i.e. the Memphis recruiting station - he sees "two fellers standing . . . and some more folks there, I reckon . . . It seems to me I remember some more folks there" (94). The iteration seems Faulkner's way of suggesting how many young men are responding to their country's need in a time of war. |
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2703 | Unnamed Crowds in Memphis |
The narrator of "Two Soldiers" is amazed at the number of people he sees in Memphis: the "folks from ever'where" and the "rushing cars and shoving folks" are clearly the most people that he has ever seen (93). |
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2702 | Unnamed Bus Driver 2 |
This second "bus feller" in "Two Soldiers" is the driver of the bus that the narrator takes from Jefferson to Memphis (93). |
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2701 | Unnamed Bus Driver 1 |
The narrator of "Two Soldiers" mentions that "the feller wound the door shut and the bus began to hum" (87). He is referring to the driver of the bus that his brother, Pete, is taking to Jefferson on the first leg of his journey to enlist in the U.S. Army. |
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2700 | Unnamed Army Lieutenant |
One of the soldiers encountered by the narrator of "Two Soldiers" in the Memphis recruiting station is a lieutenant: "he had on a belt with a britching strop over one shoulder" (94). This leather band over the right shoulder is also called a "backing strop" by the boy (95); the story uses it to indicate an officer's rank. |
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2699 | President Franklin Roosevelt |
Franklin Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, re-elected to four terms in between 1932 and his death in 1945. He is mentioned in three later texts. In "Two Soldiers" he appears only in Res Grier's reference to "Our President in Washington, D.C." (85). He is included in a list of contemporary political figures in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses - but curiously isn't on the similar list in the earlier magazine version of "Delta Autumn" (322). |
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2698 | McKellogg Boy |
The McKelloggs in "Two Soldiers" have sent their young son to "a school in the East," according to Mrs. McKellogg (98). The age affinity of the two boys may explain Mrs. McKellogg's interest in the Grier boy. |
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2697 | Colonel McKellogg |
At the McKellogg residence in "Two Soldiers," the Grier boy meets Colonel McKellogg: "a old feller, with a britching strop, too, and a silver-colored bird on each shoulder" (98). The 'birds' are in fact actually made of silver, the insignia of his rank. |
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2696 | Mrs. McKellogg |
In "Two Soldiers" Mrs. McKellogg functions somewhat as the Memphis version of Mrs. Habersham, intervening on behalf of the Grier boy. The narrator notes that she is wearing "a fur coat, but she smelled all right" (97). She provides him with food and a ride back to Frenchman's Bend. |
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2695 | General Douglas MacArthur |
In "Two Soldiers" the "General MacArthur" who was "holding" the Japanese invaders at bay in the Philipines in the nightly radio reports that the narrator and Pete listen to (82) was General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Army Forces in the Far East when the U.S. entered World War II. After the Japanese invasion forced him to withdraw from the Philippines, he spoke the parting words - "I shall return" - that were becoming famous at the time "Two Soldiers" was written. |
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2694 | Mrs. Habersham |
The older of the "two ladies in fur coats" in "Two Soldiers" whom Mr. Foote summons to help with the Grier boy (90). She may be a social worker, like the younger woman, or as is more likely, just a caring member of the community. Her family name is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha. Because the is wearing a "fur coat" and is apparently married, we assume she is not Miss Habersham, the impoverished "spinster of seventy" in Intruder in the Dust (92) and elsewhere. |
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2693 | Mr. Foote |
The boy narrator of "Two Soldiers" calls him "the Law" (89). The employee at the bus depot calls him "Mr. Foote" (89). He's probably the night marshal in Jefferson. He finds the boy alone at dawn in the empty town square, takes him to the depot, and turns him over to the town's informal social service system - "two ladies in fur coats" (90). |
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2692 | Unnamed World War I Soldiers 1 |
As he waits for Dr. Schofield to amputate his injured leg in "The Tall Men," Buddy McCallum recalls the time he was wounded during World War I: "there was a heap" of American soldiers lying "outside a field dressing station" waiting for medical attention (51). |
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2691 | Unnamed Union Cavalry 8 |
As Gombault notes in "The Tall Men," as the last military act of the Civil War "Sheridan's cavalry" blocked the road from "Appomattox to the [Shenandoah] Valley" in April, 1865, forcing Lee to surrender (54). |