Character Keys

In Go Down, Moses, this girl is a slave on Hubert Beauchamp's plantation. Since she follows Sophonsiba Beauchamp down the stairs, “carrying her fan” (12), it is likely that she is being trained as a house slave or personal slave for Sophonsiba.

Driving out to the Caledonia cemetery on the Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust, Chick sees only a single Negro: a man plowing one of the fields along the road, "the face black and gleam[ing] with sweat and passionate with effort, tense concentrated and composed" (145). The white boy and the black man look "eye to eye into each other's face before the Negro looks away" (145).

Light in August does not make clear how many people are in the "negro church" that Christmas enters during his flight across the county, but "the congregation" includes the women who "shriek" at his abrupt entrance (one of whom identifies him as "the devil!" 322), the "deacons" who go up to him and try to talk with him (323), and the "men" who, believing that Christmas is white, hold back Pappy Thompson's grandson Roz to keep him from attacking Christmas after he has struck the seventy-year-old man down (323).

The Negro children in Yoknapatawpha remain out of sight in Intruder in the Dust along with their parents, but Chick pictures them where they "should have been" on a Monday morning in the county: "in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and wornout automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans" (143).

As Ratliff puts it in The Mansion, the "Negro" whom Manfred de Spain hires to drive him as President of the bank wears a "white coat and a showfer's cap" (174).

In Sanctuary this driver gives Popeye's grandmother "half a dollar" after he interprets her demand for it as a new system for paying for groceries (306).

The Negro chauffeur in Flags in the Dust who offers to fetch Miss Jenny's driver Simon from the kitchen at the Mitchell house is "clad in army o.d. and a pair of linoleum putties" (30). ("O.d." is a military way of saying 'olive drab.')

In The Mansion this "Negro boy on [a] bicycle" is the first person Mink sees when he finally reaches Jefferson (451). He gives Mink directions to Flem Snopes' place.

In The Reivers this "Negro boy" at the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation holds the reins of Zack Edmonds' horse while Edmonds himself is in the house (62).

In the chapter titled "Was" in Go Down, Moses this enslaved boy on the Beauchamp plantation blows the fox horn announcing dinner time. Cass Edmonds thinks the boy is "about his size" (11).

This unnamed "Negro boy" is a slave owned by Doctor Holston in "My Grandmother Millard" (675).

The two groups of "customers" who patronize Willy's drugstore in "Uncle Willy" are sharply distinguished by race - and by the kinds of things they buy. This is the group that the narrator refers to as the "niggers" who "buy cards and dice" (226).

Neither "Delta Autumn" nor the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses makes clear how many people from Yoknapatawpha are in the hunting party, but at least several of them are black, and are there not to hunt but to serve the white hunters. The text names one, Isham, and singles out another as "the youngest Negro" (274, 335) - they have their own character entries. There is at least one more, because both narratives say that "two of the Negroes" cut firewood for cooking and warmth (272, 327).

This man appears in Young Bayard's thoughts as he derides himself for running away after his grandfather's death in Flags in the Dust: "You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you" (333). The novel elides the event Bayard is remembering, so we don't know anything more about the man.

In "That Evening Sun" an unnamed and undescribed Negro tells Nancy that Jesus has returned from Memphis.

Although the boy who narrates the story of "Uncle Willy" says very little about himself, he is a recognizable version of other juvenile narrators in Faulkner's fiction, and a way for Faulkner to provide a perspective on both the story's unconventional protagonist and the conventional small-town world of Jefferson. He likes playing baseball with his friends and eating the ice cream that Job makes at Willy's drugstore, is uncomfortable in school, and is willing "to do anything [Willy] asked me to do" (239).

The twelve-year-old boy who narrates "Race at Morning" is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296).

The narrator of "Death Drag" describes the unusual appearance in his little town of three barnstormers and the town's reaction to them and their stunts. He identifies himself as one of the town's older citizens, a "groundling," or non-flyer (197). Interestingly enough, the narrator qualifies his identification of Ginsfarb and Jake as Jews: "That is, [the spectators] knew at once that two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves, without being able to say what the difference was" (188).

The unnamed narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" seems to be a captain like Spoomer, who greets him as an equal while the gunnery sergeant stands in recognition of his rank (518). However, he doesn't seem to enforce his rank; the gunnery sergeant who is the source of much of his information has no qualms about discussing the antics of officers Spoomer and Sartoris with him, for example. He is an inventor, a wartime military mail censor, and a casualty of war "trying to get used to a mechanical leg" (512).

While "Lawyer" Stevens and Sheriff Hampton seem to take charge of the events in Jefferson in Intruder in the Dust, the narrative does remind readers that the town and county have the usual elected officials. The out-of-town architect who wants to buy the jail door takes his request to "the mayor and the alderman and at last the board of supervisors" (54). And Hampton does say he got the mayor's permission to give the night marshal Monday night off (216).

When Light in August describes Christmas walking in Jefferson around 9 p.m. it says that if he'd taken the same route at 7 p.m. he "would have passed people, white and black, going toward the square and the picture show" (i.e. the movies, 114). This is a rare instance in the fictions of people of both races doing the same thing - though of course there were separate "White" and "Colored" seating areas inside the theater.

In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.

In The Unvanquished Bayard notes that Mrs. Habersham "took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married" (220), but says nothing more about the minister himself.

The minister of the church that Sutpen's family attends in Absalom! tries to stop Sutpen from racing his carriage to church by "speaking [to him] in the name of the women of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County" (17). This stops Sutpen from coming to church, but the racing continues for a while. Although the novel doesn't say so, it's likely that this man is an Episcopalian minister.

When Captain Gualdres and his new bride appear in Gavin Stevens' office to say good-bye at the end of "Knight's Gambit," Gualdres refers to the marriage ceremony that has just taken place by saying, "We just leave the padre" (238). Although it's not made explicit, it's extremely likely that Gualdres himself is a Catholic - but if this "padre" is a Catholic priest, this would be the only time in the Yoknapatawpha fictions that Faulkner mentions a local Catholic church.

In "Red Leaves" the "men" of the tribe are sent out, along with the tribe's "big boys," to hunt down and capture the servant (334).

According to Gavin Stevens, "every male under sixty who had ever taken a drink or bought a bale of cotton from her father" was considered as the possible love interest in Mrs. Harriss' past ("Knight's Gambit," 245).

On their way through the streets to the railroad depot the adventurers in The Reivers are questioned by a policeman who "knew Miss Corrie" and "apparently" Sam Caldwell as well (138). He lets them proceed without incident.

In Sanctuary the town's night marshal, who tries unsuccessfully to disperse the mob that has gathered to lynch Lee Goodwin, is identified by his accoutrements: "a broad pale hat, a flash light, a time clock and a pistol" (294).

In Requiem for a Nun, Jailor Tubbs refers to the man whose job it is to arrest "drunks and gamblers" only as "the Marshal" (209). In Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions the "marshal" is a peace officer whose jurisdiction is the town of Jefferson.

In his hypothetical account of Flem's trip back to Frenchman's Bend in The Town, Gavin mentions why he could not ride with the "mail carrier," who takes passengers there "for a dollar" (305). Like other rural areas, Yoknapatawpha's Rural Free Delivery network employed multiple mailmen; this "carrier" is probably not the same person as the mail "rider" to delivers the mail to Whiteleaf and also charges a dollar for other services (176).

In "Shall Not Perish," the Griers' mail is delivered by a "carrier" who drives a car or truck (101). This service was known as "Rural Free Delivery."

"By the People" notes that symbolically "now," because farm families made so many of their purchases by mail, the "R.F.D. carrier" is "by proxy tailor and seamstress to rural America" (87). ("R[ural] F[ree] D[elivery]" brought mail directly to Americans who lived in the countryside, away from post offices. According to Wikipedia, the service began in Mississippi in 1901.)

The second lawyer Ruby hires in Sanctuary to secure Lee's release from Leavenworth may work in Kansas or New York City - the narrative is unclear. She pays this second lawyer with money, "all the money I had saved" working in New York during World War I (278), and he finds a "Congressman to get [Lee] out."

Monk's court-appointed defense attorney in "Monk" is very inexperienced. Recently admitted to the bar, he "probably knew but little more about the practical functioning of criminal law than Monk did" (42). He neglects to enter a plea of mental incompetence, because either he "forgot" or "pleaded Monk guilty at the direction of the Court" (42).

The "hired lawyer" in Absalom! (245) who seems to be responsible for sending Charles Bon on a collision course with the Sutpen family is an extremely elusive figure. He may have been the "legal advisor and man of business" to Bon's mother in New Orleans in the 1850s (252) - or he may have been invented by Shreve and Quentin in a Harvard dorm room in 1910. Outside Chapter 8, the only hint of his existence is in Mr. Compson's ambiguous reference to "the shadowy figure of a legal guardian" in Bon's life (58).

In all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy the jury finds Mink guilty without much deliberation. In The Hamlet they are described as a "grave" and impassive "conclave of grown men" (368). (Only white males served on juries in Mississippi at the time of the story. By law, women were not allowed to serve on Mississippi juries until 1968. Negroes were not legally prohibited from being jurors, but until even later it was common practice to keep them off most juries.)

In The Hamlet this is the Judge who presides over Labove's graduation ceremony from law school.

In Sanctuary the judge who presides over Lee's trial is never individualized at all. He is not even called "judge" by the narrative, just "the Court" (270, 282, etc.). We identify him as "upper class" based on the status of the title "Judge" in Faulkner's other fiction.

These men are the "nameless and faceless" clientele of the unnamed Galveston prostitute with whom Houston lives with for seven years in The Hamlet. He imagines them as a "blight" upon her reproductive system, "the Babylonian interdict by heaven forever against reproduction" (236).

Throughout all the oddities of Mrs. Gant's and Zilphia's lives in "Miss Zilphia Gant," the family dressmaking shop continues to "do well" with the women of Jefferson who can afford to have hand-tailored clothes (378, 381). After Zilphia returns to Jefferson with a story about a second marriage and a girl she calls her daughter, "the ladies" - as the narrator calls the shop's clients - "never tired of fondling little Zilphia," as he calls the girl (381).

The Town contains several references to the "ladies" of Jefferson. Gavin refers to "the Jefferson ladies" and their speculation about the reason Young Bayard Sartoris "drove too fast" (149). Charles refers to "the various Jefferson ladies" who for many years "had been locking themselves in the bathroom" to avoid Old Het (241).

In Requiem for a Nun's description of 20th century Jefferson, children from various neighborhoods all follow the wagon that delivers ice around town, "eating the fragments of ice which the Negro driver chipped off for them" (189).

This "infant" is the child of the "countrywoman" who in Sanctuary cannot find a seat on the train that takes Horace to Oxford (170).

Three sets of hunters are mentioned in "Race at Morning": the hunters from Yoknapatawpha, some of whom are named but not all, and the hunting parties at the Hog Bayou and Hollyknowe camps.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of 'hunters' - the men Ike remembers and this second group, the young men in the present who take him to the Delta, many of whom are the sons and grandsons of the men Ike remembers. As a group they respect "Uncle Ike" as their mentor, but the story implies that they are not an improvement over their ancestors.

The narrator of "The Bear" several times adds "and the others" to his references to the leaders of the annual hunting parties - Major de Spain, General Compson, the boy's father (281, 282). It's possible that the phrase is intended to refer to the lower class and non-white hunters Boon Hoggenbeck, Tennie's Jim and Uncle Ash, but it seems at least as likely that "the others" are additional men from Yoknapatawpha who join the hunt at various times.

In The Mansion the proprietor of the Pascagoula hotel knows Linda.

In The Sound and the Fury the Burgesses live near if not across the street from the Compsons. The little girl in the family comes home from school just as Caddy used to. She is used to Benjy "running along the fence" (53), and unafraid. When Benjy finds the gate unlocked one day after Caddy's wedding, he catches at this girl and "tries to say" (53) something to her - he himself cannot say what even to himself - but her father, assuming he intends to assault her, knocks him out with a fence picket.