Character Keys

In The Reivers, this "white man" is the "blackguard" who takes advantage of Bobo's "country-bred" naivete to get him in debt, and then forces him to steal the horse named Coppermine (281).

"Red Leaves" says that "a white man" taught Issetibbeha how to take snuff (321). It does not say anything about the man.

In The Sound and the Fury the boy who carries suitcases as part of Deacon's ritual way of greeting new Harvard students from the South is white. When Quentin remembers being met this way, he describes "a moving mountain of luggage" that was being carried by "a white boy of about fifteen" (97).

The young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to the Negro who brings food to the McKellogg apartment on "a kind of wheelbarrer" as "a nigger . . . in a short kind of shirttail coat" (98).

This waiter works in the Chicago night club at the end of Flags in the Dust. Described as having "a head like a monk's," he struggles with the woman who has stolen the drunken Harry Mitchell's diamond tiepin, though there is no way to know if his intention is to return it or to keep it for himself (388).

In both the short story "Raid" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Raid," these "Yankees" are not seen, but their actions are represented in the text by the ruins they have left behind them. They have been destroying railroads and burning plantations across Mississippi and Alabama, including the Sartoris place and Hawkhurst.

In both the short story and the novel titled "The Unvanquished," these are the unnamed Union soldiers attempt to intercept Rosa Millard after she takes the mules from Colonel Newberry's Union camp.

As recounted in Intruder in the Dust, in 1864 these Union troops took control of Jefferson by force and "burned to rubble" the "courthouse and everything else on or in the Square" (48-49). When Requiem for a Nun refers to this same event, it calls the Union troops who did the burning a "United States military force" (37).

In As I Lay Dying, Vernon Tull mentions the "last chap" his mother had as he recounts his mother's long life and death (30). That wording implies he had more than one sibling, but there is no way to say how many more.

In both the story and the novel "The Unvanquished," this appears to be the last Union troop that Bayard sees in Yoknapatawpha during the War; it tracks Rosa Millard down to the Sartoris plantation to recover at least some of the dozens of stolen Yankee mules who remain in the county.

The Union Army is only mentioned in The Hamlet, in the novel's reference to the groups of Union soldiers who patrolled the roads of Frenchman's Bend during the Civil War.

The Union Army in Absalom! is an unseen but important force. When "Yankee troops" pass near Yoknapatawpha at some point in the Civil War (66), for example, Coldfield's two Negro servants and "all of Sutpen's" slaves "follow the Yankee troops away" (67).

The "Uncle Job" in The Sound and the Fury works at the hardware store where Jason Compson also works. In one of his racist rants, Jason calls him "an old doddering nigger" (251), but while Jason also complains about Job's laziness, during the course of the day April 6, 1928, he is shown assembling new cultivators and delivering merchandise. Earl, the man both Job and Jason work for, says "I can depend on him" (248).

Buck Turpin is probably a merchant or businessman in Jefferson. In The Sound and the Fury he owns the lot in which the traveling show that performs in town over the Easter weekend sets up its tent, being paid $10 for that.

This is the younger of the two Turpins mentioned in The Mansion. Like the older one, he is associated with Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the hill country. Gavin Stevens recalls that he failed to "answer his draft call" during World War II (459). He is presumably related to the older Turpin, and perhaps to the Turpin family that appears in Flags in the Dust, but the novel does not say how.

In The Reivers Lucius describes the (white) passengers who ride on the "Special," the major train that runs between Memphis and New York, as "the rich women in diamonds and the men with dollar cigars" (194). He also mentions the "Negroes" in the "Jimcrow" half of the train's smoking car (194); see Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 1. ("Jimcrow," usually written Jim Crow, is a synonym for the Southern system of racial segregation.)

When in The Mansion Mink watches people getting off and on the train at the Jefferson station, he thinks of them as "rich men and women"; when he thinks of the people on the train itself, he thinks of them as "the other rich ones" (38). They certainly have more money than Mink, but are probably mostly middle-class; under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white. (Near he end of the novel he remembers these people forty years later, 445.)

In As I Lay Dying, Darl notes "the heads turning like the heads of owls" as he is taken down the aisle of the train car, laughing (253). These other passengers have an obvious reason to stare at him. (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

This "Tobe" appears in Flags in the Dust as the hostler working for the white horse trader who owns the stallion Young Bayard tries to ride; according to the trader, Tobe is the only person the horse allows to handle him.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the neighbors of the Gant family are, like many other groups of people in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, a nosy, gossipy bunch. When Gant's assistant goes to the local store to complain about his treatment, he finds them "gathered at the store" already talking about "the pistol incident" - that is, about Mrs.

In The Sound and the Fury this telegram delivery boy brings Jason news of about his investment on the commodities market.

The Samson who appears in The Town is a porter at the Snopes Hotel.

The narrator of "Tomorrow" refers once to "all the people in our country - the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners" (91). He is explaining that, despite his Uncle Gavin's formal education at Harvard and Heidelberg, he knows how to talk to "all the people" so that they understand him. This is a rare passage in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which the population of the county is aggregated across racial and class lines, though the intent of the passage is apparently to praise Gavin rather than the county's shared community.

In "By the People" the "People" of Yoknapatawpha are organized around several different points of reference. This entry refers to a group defined at the start of the story around the character of Ratliff: the ones who buy what he's selling as a salesman and the ones who enjoy listening to him as a raconteur. We could call these the (white) people of Yoknapatawpha as consumers. This group is subdivided by location and gender.

The group from the county that attends Granny's funeral in both "Vendee" and The Unvanquished consists of both blacks and whites. The whites are "hill people" as opposed to townspeople; the "hill men with crockersacks tied over their heads" to shelter them from the rain are contrasted with the "town men with umbrellas" (98, 156). In a passage added to the novel, most of the blacks are described as having returned to Yoknapatawpha after following the Union Army to seek freedom (155).

Although the crowd in The Reivers that witnesses Boon firing his gun is in the Square in Jefferson, it is explicitly described as made up of people from outside Jefferson, from Yoknapatawpha county, who are in town for a "First Saturday," a traditional "trade day": "they were all there, black and white" (14).

Throughout The Hamlet, Faulkner frequently focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." The people of Yoknapatawpha's "countryside" are described as a self-organizing social body, which can be compared to a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees" (349).

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. When the narrator of Sanctuary first introduces the Old Frenchman's ruined mansion house, he identifies "the people of the neighborhood" around it as the ones who have been using its lumber for firewood and despoiling its grounds by digging for treasure (8).

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. Various anonymous groups bear witness to the events of The Mansion.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the commentary provided by "people in our town" on the story of Mrs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. The narrator of "Hair" refers to the people of Jefferson several times, usually in connection with rumors and gossip about Susan Reed.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. Four different units appear in the short story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." This entry represents the "two soldiers in one of General Forrest's forage wagons" who bring Lucius back to Sartoris (690). As foragers, these men were charged with finding food for the troops in the surrounding countryside - a common practice in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

There are over a dozen different groups of Confederate soldiers referred to in the fictions. This is company of soldiers in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished who are "bivouacked" just outside of Jefferson; their uniforms are the color of "dead leaves" (20, 46). Since one of them hollers out "Hooraw for Arkansas!" when Bayard and Ringo drive by their camp, it seems likely that they are a unit that was raised from men in that state.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Carolina boys" whom Gombault refers to in "The Tall Men" are based on a historical fact: on the night after the first day's fighting at Chancellorsville, while reconnoitering for a possible attack, General Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot by his own troops in the 33rd North Carolina regiment (54).

According to Charles Mallison in The Town, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.

As Lucas Beauchamp notes in Go Down, Moses, the land that would have been Ike's McCaslin's inheritance was originally acquired from "the Indians back in the old time" (36). In "The Old People" the Indians are specifically identified as Chickasaws. Sam Fathers, himself half-Chickasaw and the son of a chief, refers to the tribe as "the People" (158).

In Faulkner's last book, The Reivers, the Chickasaws who once lived in Yoknapatawpha appear only in Lucius Priest's thoughts, as he lays in a bed at Ballenbaugh's and thinks about the history of the land around him, which includes "the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it" (77).

The Chickasaw tribe occupied much of the area that became Yoknapatawpha County in the decades before 1830, when white settlers began to move onto the land. By the time of "The Bear" they are long gone, though "Sam Fathers' Chickasaw predecessors" are referred to at one point (285), and at another the boy's prowess as a hunter and woodsman is measured by his ability to ambush a buck as "the old Chickasaw fathers did" (290).

In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338).

In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude.

The Myrtle in The Sound and the Fury is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece. (Chronologically it's possible that this is the same Myrtle who, younger, worked as a receptionist in Flags in the Dust, but the novel provides no evidence for that connection.)

According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," Mrs. Luke Provine receives no financial support from her ne'er-do-well husband. It seems that she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64).

The Mrs. Bland mentioned in "Ad Astra" probably doesn't exist. Bland has apparently invented an imaginary wife for his own neurotic reasons. The narrator reports "when [Bland] was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married" (408). In the story's last line, he refers to her as his "poor little wife" (429).

In Flags in the Dust Will Beard is a "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105).

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This is the Mrs. Pruitt in "Tomorrow": the widow who is the Fentry's closest neighbor. Along with her son, she tells part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin solve the mystery of why Fentry voted to convict Bookwright in the killing of Buck Thorpe.