Character Keys

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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.)

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

He is the doctor consulted in Go Down, Moses after Molly Beauchamp is found unconscious along the creek (120).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.)

"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.)

"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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).