Character Keys

In Absalom! Mr. Compson describes how on Christmas Eve, "the nigger children, with branches of holly and mistletoe for excuses, [lurked] about the rear of the big house to shout 'Christmas gift' at the white people" (84). Traditionally slaves were given holiday at Christmas, and the tradition of being rewarded for being first to wish someone a merry Christmas, while not exclusively southern or interracial, was part of the festivities.

Two of The Unvanquished stories refer to but don't name a Union general in command of the forces in the area of Yoknapatawpha. In "Ambuscade" this general is mentioned by Sergeant Harrison, who heard "the general" in command of the larger unit to which his cavalry troop belongs say that "if he had enough horses, he wouldn’t always care whether there was anybody to ride them or not" (13, 30).

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished Brother Fortinbride's eulogy for Rosa Millard expresses his faith that in heaven "there are men, women and children, black, white, yellow or red, waiting for her to tend and worry over" (98, 158). This unseen group is perhaps the most racially inclusive group in all the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

"Brother" Fortinbride is a character in two of The Unvanquished stories. A private in Sartoris' regiment, he was seriously wounded in battle at the start of the war. Invalided back to Yoknapatawpha, in "The Unvanquished" he helps Rosa distribute money and mules to the county's poor: although he is a farmer, and a Methodist, he officiates as a vernacular preacher in the services that Rosa Millard organizes in the Episcopal Church in the absence of the regular minister; his title "Brother" is an unofficial religious one.

As Rosa Millard and her group return through Alabama in "Raid" and The Unvanquished, they encounter a Union cavalry unit led by this lieutenant who, Bayard says, "didn't look much older than Ringo and me," sounds "like a girl" when he swears, and looks as if he's "fixing to cry" when forced to turn over his troop's horses to her (56, 116-17).

Colonel Sartoris' first military command was the regiment that he raised at the beginning of the Civil War. According to Uncle Buck McCaslin in "Retreat," Sartoris "bought and paid for" it, which presumably means that Sartoris underwrote the costs of arming and equipping the unit, though no further details about that process are provided (21).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this man is identified only as an "officer," but he is distinguishable by the "stubble of beard and long streak of blood" on his "little white face"; he warns Rosa Millard that the army is preparing to blow up the bridge (49, 105).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this is the Union officer who asks Drusilla to convince the Negroes camped out at the river to return to their former owners.

In "Raid" and again in the chapter titled "Raid" in The Unvanquished, this is the outfit of Union soldiers who are riding through the countryside in Alabama when Ringo stops them in order to requisition additional property.

In the story Will Falls tells Old Bayard in Flags in the Dust about the Yankees arriving at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, this is "that 'ere other Yankee" who goes around the house looking for him at the barn (21); John fools him long enough to get around the corner before the man starts shooting at him. When this story is told again in "Retreat" and The Unvanquished this Union soldier, perhaps frustrated by not capturing John Sartoris in the barn, points his "carbine" directly at the two boys, Bayard and Ringo, "and shot at us pointblank" (34, 73).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this is the officer in command of the Confederate cavalrymen who warns Granny that she should turn back because "the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols" (24, 56). He apologizes for saying "hell" in her presence, and is chivalrous enough to offer her "an escort" when she insists on going on (24, 56).

In Light in August this is the troop of Confederate cavalry under the command of General Van Dorn to which Hightower's grandfather belonged. During the Civil War it rode into Jefferson and destroyed a Union supply depot, after which most of them rode away. (This event that Hightower is obsessed with is adapted by Faulkner from an actual raid that occurred in 1862 in Holly Springs, a Mississippi town near Oxford.)

One of the Chickasaws in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun wears a "foxhorn" around his neck which Compson blows to call in "his men" from the search for the missing lock (210, 16).

In Flags in the Dust this unnamed woman is pregnant again when she moves from the countryside into Jefferson with her husband and two children. When her husband is drafted and shipped overseas, she is helped by the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow.

In Absalom! this sentry guards the tent in the Carolina bivouac where Sutpen and Henry meet.

The children Addie taught before her marriage in As I Lay Dying are described only from her point of view, which is an avowedly hateful one. To her, they are represented by their "little dirty snuffling noses" (169). She takes pleasure in the thought that when she whips them for "faulting" in school, she becomes part of their "secret and selfish" lives (170).

In The Sound and the Fury the unnamed little girl who walks home from school with the Burgess girl is "scared" of Benjy, though her friend assures her that "he wont hurt you" (53).

In "Monk" the "country school" that Monk attends as a first-grader almost certainly was a one-room schoolhouse, and his schoolmates probably ranged in age from six to sixteen or so (48). But when Monk describes his experience there, he tells Gavin that "they [the students] would all read together out of the books," and that, although he was illiterate, "it was fine . . . to hear all the voices together," including his (48).

The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in The Town: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153).

Simon Strother, who was born a slave just before the Civil War began, provides the only depiction in Flags in the Dust of the enslaved men and women who 'belonged' to the Sartoris family. It occurs when he tells Dr. Peabody how the birth of Bayard and Narcissa's son will bring back "de olden times" (391). As his example of those times, he describes "de niggers fum de quawtuhs gethered on de front lawn, wishin' Mistis en de little marster well" when his "Mars' John's" son Bayard was born in 1849 (392).

The "runaway slave" mentioned in Absalom! is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites).

Jack Crenshaw and this man whom The Town does not name are federal officers, "revenue field agents" (182), who "are just interested in whiskey, not photography" (183). They find the moonshine whiskey in Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio. (As officials whose task it is to make sure all alcohol production is properly taxed, 'revenuers' play a prominent role in the lore of moonshine whiskey.)

At noon in Rogers' grocery and restaurant in Flags in the Dust are two different groups of people: there are "a number of customers" in the grocery, not otherwise described, and in the restaurant "a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people" (119).

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, the other customers in the Memphis restaurant where Boon Hogganbeck and Quentin eat dinner listen to the drunken Boon's stories of Lion and Old Ben.

In Flags in the Dust this is the railroad employee who, once a week, delivers Belle's shrimp to Horace from "the door of the express car" (374-75). He assumes Horace must be using it for bait.

Only one of the prostitutes who work at Miss Reba's in The Mansion, Thelma, is given a name (84). As a group they are imagined, in Montgomery Ward Snopes' narration, "running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that," and also "screaming and fighting and pulling each other's hair" (81). According to Snopes, "so many" of them "came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families" (83).

In The Mansion the guards at Parchman penitentiary are described as "men with shotguns" at the gate, and as "men on horses with shotguns across the pommels" overseeing the inmates as they work in the field (54).

In his hunt for Joe Christmas in Light in August Sheriff Kennedy is joined by a large posse. There are "thirty or forty" men waiting for the bloodhounds who arrive on the train the day after Joanna's body is discovered (296), and the narrative suggests this same group remains on the trail through the following week.

These are "the police" who come to the Temples' apartment to arrest Nancy in Requiem for a Nun (153). (Elsewhere Faulkner describes the officers of the law in Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha as sheriffs and deputies and marshals, but not as 'police.')

In Absalom!, "whenever anyone white or black stops in the road" to speak to Charles E. S-V. Bon (162), Clytemnestra "drives the passerby on" with a "murmur of vituperation" (162).

In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke.

This is the "old negro woman" in Light in August who sits, "smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth," whom Joe Brown calls "Aunty" when he asks her to help him get a message to the sheriff (433-34). At first she refuses, saying that the one black man she knew who "thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him . . . aint never come back" (434).

In "Red Leaves" the group that pursues the runaway servant does not include the tribe's old men - or its women and children.

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris mentions these people in his letter to Jenny, asking her to "tell [them] hello" (529).

Much to Mink's surprise in The Mansion, this "big Negro woman" (305) is a congregant of Goodyhay's church. Albert explains to Mink that "her son had it too just like she was a white woman" - "it" is never clearly explained, but probably means that this son was killed during World War II (305).

In Flags in the Dust the wife of the black farmer in whose barn Bayard spends his last night in Yoknapatawpha feeds him breakfast and dinner on Christmas Day, but she herself is not named or described.

In Light in August this young man offers Joe a ride to Mottstown. He is from "two counties back yonder," and so presumably not aware of either Joanna's murder or the manhunt for Christmas (339).

In "A Justice" Doom and the Chocktaws own a sizable number of black slaves. Four of them are briefly traded - along with the six slaves he has recently won on the steamboat from New Orleans - to two unnamed white men for the grounded riverboat which Doom then has moved by slaves to his plantation.

These are the "few Negro servants" in "Knight's Gambit" who worked for Mrs. Harriss' father in the past; they were the her only "companions" growing up (150).

In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow.

In Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157).

This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191).

While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37).

In Intruder in the Dust this is the man who is "tending" the moonshine still that the Sheriff discovers (228). Claiming to know nothing about it, he takes care of the Sheriff, and the problem, by making him comfortable and offering him a drink or two or more of "water" (228).

The narrator of Light in August identifies the black man who rides to the Sheriff's house in Jefferson "on a saddleless mule" to report Christmas' violent disruption of the "revival meeting" at "the negro church" only as "the messenger" (322, 323). He is anxious to convince the Sheriff that the blacks had not been "bothering" Christmas beforehand (324).

This is the Negro in Light in August whom Sheriff Kennedy forces to talk about the situation at the Burden place. At first the man pleads ignorance but then, after being whipped by the deputy, says "It's two white man" who have been living there (293). He tells the Sheriff that he doesn't live nearby, but "down the road" (292).

This is the man in Flags in the Dust who provides Byron Snopes with the Ford car in which he flees Yokapatawpha after robbing the bank. He is identified simply as "the negro [Byron] sought," and Byron finds him just off the Square, on a "street occupied by negro stores and barber shops" (272).

In The Reivers this "uniformed maid" helps serve supper at Colonel Linscomb's (277).

In The Town this man works with Eck Snopes at a logging mill. Gavin Stevens calls him "one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecilic" in describing his and Eck's disastrous attempt to set "a tremendous cypress log . . . onto the saw-carriage" (33).