Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
2893 | Ephriam |
In Intruder in the Dust Chick recalls Ephriam, Paralee's father, "an old man, a widower," living in her cabin and walking the roads at night: "not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day" in a rocking chair (61). By consulting a white fortune-teller, Ephriam finds out where Maggie Mallison's lost ring can be found (69). And like Tomey's Turl in the short story "Was," he knows that it's "womens and children" who are best at getting uncommon things done (70). |
|
2892 | Mrs. Downs |
In Intruder in the Dust Mrs. Downs is "an old white woman who lived alone in a small filthy shoebox of a house . . . in a settlement of Negro houses," and makes her living telling fortunes, curing hexes and finding lost objects for African American customers (69). She is perhaps the same as, or is at least very similar to the "half-crazed" woman who appears in Sanctuary. |
|
2891 | Armstead |
The Confederate officer Faulkner calls "Armstead" in Intruder in the Dust (190) is undoubtedly Lewis Armistead, who commanded one of the brigades in Pickett's division that led the famous charge against the Yankee army on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg. Armistead along with some of his unit advanced further in that attack than any other rebels; he was mortally wounded just as he reached the stone wall that marked the Union lines. |
|
2890 | Top |
As Charles Mallison notes in The Town, "he was Guster's boy and his father was named Top too so they called him Big Top and Top Little Top" (55). Charles however always calls him "Top" in the few places where he appears. He and Gowan Stevens try to help Gavin by setting a trap for De Spain's car. |
|
2889 | Big Top |
In The Town Big Top is Guster's husband and father to Aleck Sander and Little Top. Only his name appears in the narrative (55). |
|
2888 | Unnamed Young Chickasaw Men |
The group of "young men" who are attracted to Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" includes, but is by no means limited to, Owl-by-Night and Sylvester's John (363). Without exception, these would-be suitors "look away" from her once Ikkemotubbe's interest becomes known (363). They even help him in his efforts to attract her attention. At the end of the story, at least some of these "young men" leave the plantation on the steamboat with David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe (380), but the text does not say how far they go. |
|
2887 | Unnamed Wife of David Colbert |
In "A Courtship," this woman is the great-aunt of the second cousin of Herman Basket's aunt (363). As the wife of the "chief Man of the Chickasaws" (365), she would have a lot of status. From her, Herman Basket's aunt acquires both a "silver wine pitcher" (363) and a belief in her own family's superiority. |
|
2886 | Unnamed Whisky-Trader 2 |
In "A Courtship" the "whisky-trader" who apparently makes regular visits to the Chickasaws brings the whiskey on which the tribe's young men get Log-in-the-Creek drunk (364). What he trades his whiskey for is not specified. |
|
2885 | Unnamed Uncle of Herman Basket |
"Dead" before "A Courtship" begins, this man is mentioned as the original owner of the "shotgun" that Herman Basket's aunt threatens to use on her niece's suitors (368). |
|
2884 | Unnamed Ten-Year-Old Chickasaw Boy |
In "A Courtship," before Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck's eating contest begins, this "ten-year-old boy" runs around the race-track once, to give the contestants a chance to recover their breath (372). |
|
2883 | Unnamed Sister of Herman Basket |
The phrase the narrator of "A Courtship" uses to describe Herman Basket's sister - "she walks in beauty" - sounds faintly 'Indian' but is actually borrowed from Lord Byron (362). Or "sat in it, that is," he adds - which sounds pretty risque, though becomes less so when he adds that she doesn't walk at all "unless she had to" (362). Like Eula Varner in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, she is lazy and slovenly but exercises an irresistible power over all the men who see her. While she is at the center of the story's courtship plot, she does not actually speak a single word in it. |
|
2882 | Unnamed Second Cousin of Herman Basket's Aunt |
The "second cousin" of Herman Basket's aunt is also the "grand-niece of the wife of old David Colbert" (363, 365). She does not appear in "A Courtship," but the "silver wine pitcher" she bequeathed her second cousin does (363). |
|
2881 | Unnamed Father of Narrator 2 |
The father of the Chickasaw Indian who narrates "A Courtship" advises Ikkemotubbe about the best strategy for courting Herman Basket's sister, and helps Owl-by-Night look for Ikkemotubbe's horse. Along with "the young men," he also stokes the fire in the steamboat at the end of the story (380), which leaves open a possibility that the text never develops: perhaps like Ikkemotubbe, the narrator's father "went away" from the plantation (362). |
|
2880 | Unnamed Slaves of Indians 6 |
A number of Mississippi Indians did own slaves, and in "Red Leaves" and "A Justice," Faulkner's other Indian stories, he explores this theme in detail. In "A Courtship," however, it only appears in the narrator's brief mention of the black people whom Ikkemotubbe brings with him when he returns to the plantation three years after the story's main events: the "eight new slaves which we did not need" (363), later referred to as "the eight more slaves which we had no use for" (379). |
|
2879 | Unnamed Enslaved Boy 3 |
The "boy slave who turned the wheel" is the steersman on Studenmare's steamboat (366). His age is not given, but the narrator of "A Courtship" notes that he is "not much more than half as big as Captain Studenmare" (366). |
|
2878 | Unnamed Aunt of Herman Basket |
The unnamed aunt whom Herman Basket and his sister live with in "A Courtship" seems to be their surrogate parent; the other Chickasaw often hear her voice when it is raised to scold her niece's laziness. She is also actively involved in her niece's courtship. It is to ingratiate himself and his cause with her that Ikkemotubbe sends a pony and his gamecocks as gifts, and when the suitors won't behave she does not hesitate to threaten them with a shotgun. She feels that her family is superior to "Issetibbeha's whole family" (365). |
|
2877 | Sylvester's John |
Although his name evokes the way enslaved Negroes were often named, Sylvester's John is actually one of the young Chickasaw men who are interested in Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" - until it becomes clear that Ikkemotubbe wants her. After that, he is one of the young men who willingly help Ikkemotubbe's courtship. |
|
2876 | Captain Studenmare |
In "A Courtship," Captain Studenmare is the owner of the steamboat that visits the Chickasaw plantation annually. He depends upon another man, David Hogganbeck, to pilot it. After he fires Hogganbeck for dereliction, he is forced to return to Natchez overland with his "steamboat slaves," the enslaved Negroes who do the physical work on board the ship (378). |
|
2875 | Log-in-the-Creek |
In "A Courtship," Log-in-the-Creek is the only one of the Chickasaw young men who does not stop courting Herman Basket's sister after Ikkemotubbe's interest in her becomes known. His unheroic name seems to fit his apparently negligible character: he cannot hold his liquor, and he "raced no horses and fought no cocks and cast no dice" (364). |
|
2874 | David Hogganbeck |
The character David Hogganbeck in "A Courtship" evokes the heroes of American tall tales about the frontier. "Bigger than any two" of the Chickasaw men "put together" (366), he is a skilled steamboat pilot, an accomplished fiddle player, a formidable opponent in eating, drinking and dancing competitions, and Ikkemotubbe's chivalrous rival for the hand of Herman Basket's sister. For her love he is willing to throw off his job, and for his Indian rival he is willing to lose his life. |
|
2873 | David Colbert |
The character whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to twice as "old David Colbert" (365, 374) is presumably based on a real historical figure, Levi Colbert. The son of white father from North Carolina and a Chickasaw mother, he grew up among the Indians. Among the real Chickasaws (unlike Faulkner's) kinship was defined in matrilineal terms, and through his mother's lineage and his own accomplishments Colbert eventually became head chief of the Chickasaw nation - or as the story says about "David," "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365). |
|
2872 | Mr. Workman |
In "An Error in Chemistry" Mr. Workman is an insurance adjuster from the Memphis office of the company that wrote a life insurance policy on Ellie. He is dressed in "neat city clothes" (126), and speaks with a "cold" voice, yet is described as being in "a sort of seething boil" about the shooting (126). Suspecting something after meeting with "Old Man Pritchel" in person (126), he goes out of his way to tell the sheriff about the imminent sale of the Pritchel farm. |
|
2871 | Unnamed Three Northern Men |
In "An Error in Chemistry" these three men from an unidentified place in the North want to buy Wesley Pritchel's farm in order to use the clay from the clay-pit to "manufacture some kind of road material" (119). |
|
2870 | Unnamed Random Boys |
According to "An Error in Chemistry," "generations" of these "random boys" dug into the clay-pit on Wesley Pritchel's farm, where they found "Indian and even aboriginal relics - flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes ad skulls and thigh-bones and pipes" (119). |
|
2869 | Unnamed Members of Posse 4 |
In "An Error in Chemistry" the sheriff sends "Ben Berry and some others" to Joel Flint's house in case the escaped Joel Flint returns there (122). These "others" are not described in any way, though it seems as if they are not members of the sheriff's office, which is why we identify them as a kind of 'posse.' |
|
2868 | Unnamed Local Residents |
In "An Error in Chemistry" these unnamed local residents are the neighbors whom Joel Flint meets and talks with most often "in the little cross-road hamlet near his home" and occasionally in "Jefferson" (114). Nothing specific is known about them as a group or individually, except that they find Flint contemptuous of their custom for drinking whiskey with sugar and water. |
|
2867 | Unnamed Archaeologists 2 |
In "An Error in Chemistry" a group of "archaeologists from the State University" dig up Native American relics from Pritchel's clay pit until he runs them off with a shotgun (119). |
|
2866 | Wesley Pritchel |
Wesley Pritchel owns a small farm in "An Error in Chemistry." He is unhappy when his "dim-witted spinster" daughter, Ellie, marries Joel Flint, a carnival pitch man (113). Pritchel is irascible and likes to be left alone. He is murdered by Joel Flint. |
|
2865 | Mrs. Wesley Pritchel |
The unnamed wife of Wesley Pritchel was the mother of four children. She is already dead when "An Error in Chemistry" begins. |
|
2864 | Pritchel, Children of Wesley |
In "An Error in Chemistry," Joel Flint says during his impersonation of Wesley Pritchel that 'he' had "four children," all of whom have died (130); Joel is just mean enough to include the one he killed, Ellie, in this count. As Ellie Flint (nee Pritchel) she has her own entry in the database. |
|
2863 | Joel Flint |
Joel Flint, the protean villain in "An Error in Chemistry," used to work in carnivals. At one point he was known as Signor Canova, a master of illusion. After abandoning the Canova persona, Flint started working in other circuses, serving as "bandsman, ringman, Bornean wild man" (134). Eventually, his role in traveling carnivals was as a pitch man with a "roulette wheel wired against imitation watches and pistols which would not shoot" (134). |
|
2862 | Ellie Flint |
The only child of Wesley Pritchel, Ellie is a "dim-witted spinster of almost forty" (113) when she marries Joel Flint in "An Error in Chemistry." After their marriage, she farms and raises chickens in a small house built on the Pritchel farm for approximately two years until she is murdered by her husband. |
|
2861 | Bryan Ewell |
In "An Error in Chemistry" Bryan Ewell is a deputy sheriff whom the sheriff orders to guard Wesley Pritchel's house after Pritchel has locked himself in his room (122). (Bryan may be related to Walter Ewell, who appears in six other fictions, but there is no mention of any relationship.) |
|
2860 | Ben Berry |
In "An Error in Chemistry" Ben Berry is a Deputy Sheriff. Sheriff Hub sends him to keep an eye on the Flints' house in case Joel Flint returns there after escaping from the local jail cell. He loses his "spectacles in the woods" during the pursuit, and so can't read an important clue to the killer's identity (123). |
|
2859 | Roscius |
In Go Down, Moses Roscius (spelled "Roskus" 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). He is the husband of Phoebe (spelled "Fibby" in the ledger, 252), and was like her manumitted when Old Carothers died in 1837. According to the ledger, despite being free he "Dont want to leave," and he remains on the plantation until his death four years later (252). |
|
2858 | Dilsey's Family |
Dilsey, her daughter Frony, her son TP, and her grandson Luster have separate entries in the "Appendix Compson" and in our database. This entry, however, represents the collective group referred to in the "Appendix" as "Dilsey's family," who lived as a group in the "one servant's cabin" left on the Compson property (330). If Faulkner is thinking of the "family" as he depicts it in The Sound and the Fury and "That Evening Sun," it also includes Dilsey's husband, Roskus, and another son, Versh. |
|
2857 | Unnamed Enslaved People 3 |
There are two references in "Appendix Compson" to the slaves who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War. The term "slaves" appears only in reference to the "shiftless slaves" owned by the descendants of the Chickasaw tribe who remain in the region after the Indian Removal (329). But the Compson family, like the other "masters of plantations" in Yoknapatawpha, owned a number of slaves as well (328). |
|
2856 | Unnamed American Soldier 2 |
In "Appendix Compson," this soldier is described as merely "a shape (a man in khaki)," as seen through Melissa Meek's tear-filled eyes (337). But he picks her up and installs her in a seat when she is overwhelmed by the crowds at the Memphis bus station. Although he is presumably part of the crowd of "soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death" in the Second World War (337), Faulkner reasserts the humanity of those that make up the crowd through this soldier's stateside actions. |
|
2855 | Unnamed Secessionists |
The unnamed secessionists with whom Charles Stuart Compson is associated in "Appendix Compson" endeavored to "secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain" (327). The plotters are headed by General James Wilkinson, whose real-life attempts to sell land to Spain were backed by a number of prominent Kentuckians. |
|
2854 | Unnamed Carpetbagger from New England |
The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South. Faulkner's carpetbaggers tend toward economic, rather than political, influence in Jefferson. In "Appendix Compson," the demands of this "New England carpetbagger" against the Compson estate prompt Jason to sell off small sections of his land, thus enabling the Snopeses to "encroach" on his holdings (329). |
|
2853 | Unnamed Marshals of Napoleon |
"Napoleon's marshals," otherwise known as the Marshals of the Empire, are characterized in "Appendix Compson" as a "glittering galaxy of knightly blackguards" (325). Napoleon reinstated the rank of marshal, the highest military rank in France, in 1804, and appointed 26 marshals, 18 of them in one month. These men were notable for reflecting his own preferences, rather than for having reached a given level of accomplishment. Nearly all lived luxurious lifestyles, at least in part due to their newly elevated status. |
|
2852 | Unnamed King 2 |
The "English king" against whom Quentin MacLachan Compson fights in "Appendix Compson" (326) was George II, notable here for putting an end to the Jacobite rebellions regarding succession to the British crown. Compson's homeland in Scotland, Culloden Moor, was the site of the last major Jacobite uprising. After being defeated there by George II's son, many of the Jacobites were executed or (like the first American Compson) fled the country. |
|
2851 | Unnamed King 1 |
The "dispossessed" king for whom in "Appendix Compson" the grandfather of the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha fought (325) is Charles Edward Stuart, who spent most of his life in exile but claimed to be the rightful king of Britain as part of the Jacobite line of Catholic monarchs. His hope of claiming the throne ended in 1746, when the Jacobites were defeated in a final battle in Scotland. Charles himself is perhaps best remembered for a romantic escape through the Scottish countryside after that loss. |
|
2850 | Unnamed Jewish Manufacturers |
The narrator of "Appendix Compson" refers to "the Jew owners of Chicago and New York sweatshops" who manufacture the "fine bright cheap intransigent clothes" that TP wears (343). The stereotypical assumptions about exploitative urban "Jews" betrays a streak of antisemitism that certainly recalls Jason Compson's ethnic prejudices in The Sound and the Fury but that is somewhat shocking in the post-World War Two era of the "Appendix." |
|
2849 | Unnamed Jefferson Police |
The officers of the law in Jason Compson IV's entry in "Appendix Compson" are described from the anxious perspective of his own criminality: when his niece takes the money he's been embezzling, he cannot turn to them for help recovering it without admitting more of his affairs than he cares to, and yet he chafes at paying for a police force that he characterizes as existing in "parasitic and sadistic idleness" (342). |
|
2848 | Unnamed Jefferson Ladies 4 |
These "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" of Jefferson in "Appendix Compson"- including some who were part of the "old highschool class" with Melissa Meek and Caddy Compson - are very concerned to appear respectable: they keep the racier modern romance novels they check out of the town library "carefully wrapped from view in sheets of Memphis and Jackson newspapers" (333). |
|
2847 | Unnamed Indians in Oklahoma |
The Chickasaw were one of several tribes that were displaced by President Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830. In "Appendix Compson," Faulkner indicates the enduring consequences of that removal, referring to the Chickasaw people in Oklahoma as "the homeless descendants of the dispossessed" (326). |
|
2846 | Unnamed Illegitimate Children 2 |
The "foals" referred to in the description of the passengers in the Memphis bus station in "Appendix Compson" are the illegitimate children conceived during wartime relationships between "homeless young women" and migratory men in the military (337). These children are described as being abandoned in "charity wards or policestations" (337). |
|
2845 | Unnamed High School Students |
In "Appendix Compson" these "highschool juniors and seniors" are described from the perspective of Melissa Meek, who emphasizes both their great height relative to her own petite stature and also their seemingly relentless desire to thwart her moderate attempts at book censure (333). |
|
2844 | Unnamed German General |
The "handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral" who is seen in a photograph in "Appendix Compson" is presumably Caddy's lover during World War II (334). He and that relationship are further characterized by the photo's luxurious background: "a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car," all of which are featured in "a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight" (334). |
|
2843 | Unnamed Feedstore Customers |
These "overalled men" in "Appendix Compson" are customers at the farmers' supply store where Jason IV owns a business buying and selling cotton (334). Although the customers are explicitly male, since the store is a "gloomy cavern which only men ever entered" (333), their race is not so clearly defined; the narrative indicates that the store serves "Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers" (334), indicating that many, if not most of the customers are African-American. |
|
2842 | Unnamed Family of Quentin MacLachan Compson's Mother |
Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, and raise him there after her death. |
|
2841 | Unnamed District Chancellor |
In "Appendix Compson," this district Chancellor annually reviews the financial reports submitted by Jason Compson as the "guardian and trustee" of his niece (342). |
|
2840 | Unnamed Chickasaw Descendants in Mississippi 2 |
As noted in "Appendix Compson," "Ikkemotubbe's descendants and people" - the tribe of Chickasaw Indians that originally lived in Yoknapatawpha - are "gone" after being 'removed' by the U.S. government (328), but the descendants of the Indians who married Negroes remain, though the "wild blood" on their Indian ancestry appears "only occasionally in the noseshape of a Negro on a cottonwagon" (329). |
|
2839 | Unnamed Chickasaw Descendants in Mississippi 1 |
The descendants of Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws who remain after the Removal eventually disappear too, but that does not mean that there are no living men or women with Chickasaw blood. The narrative indicates that those who still carry Chickasaw blood are "living not as warriors and hunters but as white men - as shiftless farmers or, here and there, the masters of what they too called plantations" (328). |
|
2838 | Unnamed Bus Passengers |
When Melissa Meek gets there in "Appendix Compson," the bus station in Memphis is filled with "a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions" (337). |
|
2837 | Unnamed Boardinghouse Owner |
In "Appendix Compson" the owner of the boardinghouse that used to be the Compson family home is a "countryman," which in this context refers to a rural person as opposed to someone from town (331). |
|
2836 | Melissa Meek |
In "Appendix Compson," Melissa Meek is the "county librarian, a mouse-sized and -colored woman who had never married," and also a former classmate of Caddy Compson who sees a photo of her in occupied France (333). Attempting to "save" Caddy enables Meek to transcend the characterization of her name, her profession, and her lifelong habits (335). Sporting "two feverish spots of determination in her ordinarily colorless cheeks" (333), she enters the feedstore where Jason IV works and where "only men ever entered," and she speaks to him, despite having refused to do so for many years. |
|
2835 | Napoleon |
Napoleon Bonaparte rose to prominence in France during the French Revolution. In 1804 he proclaimed himself Emperor, and undertook to wage a series of wars in order to achieve dominion over Europe. The allusion to him at the beginning of "Appendix Compson" serves as a template for several of the characters Faulkner will create: dictatorial leaders driven to expand their holdings at all costs. |
|
2834 | Thorne Smith |
Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plots that include much drinking, sex, and humor. According to "Appendix Compson," the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" in Faulkner's Jefferson hide the copies of Smith's books that they borrow from and return to the library "carefully wrapped" inside newspapers (333). |
|
2833 | Sir Banastre Tarleton |
The British commander that Charles Stuart Compson fought under in the "Appendix Compson" (326), Banastre Tarleton, was known in England as an outstanding military leader during the Revolutionary War, which he joined at the age of 21. In America, however, Tarleton had a reputation for savagery on the field; he and his men participated in the capture of Charleston, and later became infamous for what Americans called the "Waxhaws Massacre" in South Carolina in 1780. |
|
2832 | Daniel Boone |
The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians. |
|
2831 | Unnamed Women of Yoknapatawpha |
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" remarks "that any woman in Frenchman's Bend and I reckon in the rest of the county too could have described" De Spain's parlor (106). |
|
2830 | Unnamed Old Testament Prophets |
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111), the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses, as a reference point for the age of his father's Grandfather. |
|
2829 | Unnamed Museum Visitors |
These men and women in "Shall Not Perish" visit the museum in Jefferson "without charge" (111). The narrator says they are "people like us from Frenchman's Bend," by which he seems to mean poor farmers and their families, from "our county or beyond our state too" (111). |
|
2828 | Unnamed Founder of Museum |
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish." |
|
2827 | Unnamed Men Who Borrow Money |
The narrator on "Shall Not Perish" speculates about "the men who would come to Major de Spain after bank-hours or on Sunday to ask to have a note extended" (106-107). |
|
2826 | De Spain Ancestors |
In "Shall Not Perish" Major de Spain refers to his son's "forefathers [who] fought and died for [their country] then, even though what they fought and lost for was a dream" (108). "Then" is "eighty years ago," and as the word "lost" suggests, the country he is talking about was the Confederacy; these forefathers fought against the United States. (One of them would have been this Major's father, who was a Major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.) De Spain's unreconstructed attitude explains why he covers his son's coffin with "the Confederate flag" (107). |
|
2825 | Unnamed Artists |
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" and his mother tour an art museum in Jefferson that contains "pictures from all over the United States, painted by people who loved what they had seen or where they had been born or lived enough to want to paint pictures of it so that other people could see it too" (110). These works of art, and the people who created them, fuel the Grier boy's imagination. |
|
2824 | Unnamed Americans |
At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115). |
|
2823 | Unnamed American Soldiers and Sailors |
In "Shall Not Perish," after Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures. |
|
2822 | Unnamed Tennessee Unionists |
Describing his family history in "My Grandmother Millard," Philip Backhouse refers to the group that prevented his uncle from being elected Governor of Tennessee as "a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists" (682). Although Tennessee did secede from the Union and join the Confederacy (the last state to do so), it was deeply divided between secessionists and Unionists. |
|
2821 | Unnamed Enslaved People 2 |
As the progress of the Civil War brings the Union Army closer to Yoknapatawpha in "My Grandmother Millard," Lucius begins meeting with "Negroes from other plantations," presumably to talk about the possibility of emancipating themselves (669). |
|
2820 | Unnamed Plantation Mistresses |
According to Ab Snopes in "My Grandmother Millard," "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't copy the strategy that Mrs. Compson used to try to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676). |
|
2819 | Unnamed Newspaper Editor 2 |
The "Richmond Editor" mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard" is less a character than a way of locating an event: it is in his newspaper office that Jubal Early calls "Joe Wheeler" an "apostate and matricide" for fighting in the American Army during the Spanish-American War (673). |
|
2818 | Unnamed Confederate Soldier 1 |
In "My Grandmother Millard" Forrest tells Granny that he has placed Philip "in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet" (694) - this is that guard. |
|
2817 | Unnamed Confederate Provost Marshal |
The "provost" who arrests Philip for disobeying orders in "My Grandmother Millard" (692). In the Confederate armies, provost marshals were charged with maintaining discipline - like military police in the modern U.S. armed forces. (The second time the story refers to him, "Provost" is capitalized, 694.) |
|
2816 | Unnamed Confederate Officers 2 |
In "My Grandmother Millard," four officers "in their gray and braid and sabres" accompany Philip and the chaplain to the wedding at Sartoris (699). This group probably includes some of the five officers who came to Sartoris earlier with Forrest, but that is not directly said or suggested in the text. |
|
2815 | Unnamed Confederate Officers 1 |
These five Confederate cavalry officers accompany General Forrest when he visits the Sartoris plantation in "My Grandmother Millard." Bayard says they are "all officers," adding that "I never saw this much braid before" (691). Granny refers to them as "gentlemen," and the story confirms that when it describes how carefully they avoid "trombling even one flower bed" on the plantation lawn (691). |
|
2814 | Unnamed Confederate Chaplain |
The "chaplain" who marries Philip and Melisandre in "My Grandmother Millard" is an officer serving in Forrest's troop (699). |
|
2813 | Aunt Roxanne |
A slave belonging to the Compson family who is mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard." Despite her enslavement, she remains loyal to the Compsons during a moment of danger. |
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2812 | General Joe Wheeler |
General Wheeler fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Three decades later he fought for the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Bayard Sartoris in "My Grandmother Millard" says that "Father would have called [him an] apostate" for fighting under the American flag, and the story quotes another Confederate general, Jubal Early, as saying Wheeler will go to hell for that betrayal of the Lost Cause (673). |
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2811 | Francis Marion |
Colonel Francis was a real historical figure, one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War. Nicknamed "Swamp Fox," Marion became famous as a guerilla fighter against the British in the early 1780s. Like Faulkner's Colonel Sartoris, he led a small troop of men that effectively harassed a larger occupying army; this is the long campaign that Philip Backhouse refers to in "My Grandmother Millard" when he says his grandfather fought "with Marion all through Carolina" (682). Marion is mentioned again in Requiem for a Nun. |
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2810 | General Jubal Early |
A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673). |
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2809 | General Braxton Bragg |
Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general who commanded the Army of Tennessee. In "My Grandmother Millard," Colonel Sartoris' troop is, Bayard notes, fighting under his command in that state (674), and Philip Backhouse's uncle is on "Bragg's personal staff" (693). |
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2808 | Philip St-Just Backhouse |
"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner. |
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2807 | Backhouse, Uncle of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard," Philip lists his Uncle, who ran unsuccessfully "for Governor of Tennessee" on what was obviously a pro-slavery platform, as one of the ancestors who have worn the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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2806 | Backhouse, Father of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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2805 | Backhouse, Grandfather of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists this Grandfather, who fought on the colonial side with "Marion all through Carolina" during the American Revolution, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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2804 | Unnamed Union Officers |
According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.) |
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2803 | Unnamed Union Intelligence Officer |
In Go Down, Moses Faulkner (or Cass) invents this "Yankee Intelligence officer" who finds Lee's "battle-order . . . on the floor of a saloon" (272). (The losing and finding of Lee's order actually happened during the Civil War, but in fact it was found by a Union corporal lying in the grass.) |
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2802 | Unnamed Union Army Paymaster |
In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278). |
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2801 | Unnamed Traders and Ship-Owners |
In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about the kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for the Civil War. This entry refers to the group he calls "the narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to the [American] continent only by their-counting houses" (273). He means the business men who made money from the slave and cotton trade with Africa and Europe. |
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2800 | Unnamed Townsmen |
Among the people who come out to the hunting camp to watch the final hunt for the bear in Go Down, Moses are several men from beyond Yoknapatawpha, "townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson" (212). They come because they have heard of Lion and Old Ben, but are not hunters: "Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday" (212). |
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2799 | Unnamed Swamper Who Shoots at Old Ben |
In Go Down, Moses this "swamper" is described as having "a gaunt face, the small black orifice of his yelling studded with rotten teeth" (226). |
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2798 | Unnamed Spinster Aunts and Uncles |
In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to him, brought about the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273). |
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2796 | Unnamed Southern Wives and Daughters |
In his conversation with his cousin Edmonds in Part 4 of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to the "wives and daughters" of the plantation owners who fed and nursed their sick slaves both in "their stinking cabins" and, "when they were very sick," in "the big house itself" (271). |
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2795 | Unnamed Enslaved People 1 |
Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War. |
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2794 | Unnamed Slaves of McCaslins 2 |
In Go Down, Moses Carothers McCaslin owned a number of slaves, including the ones he brought with him from Carolina and the ones he fathered; those named slaves have their own entries. This entry represents the rest of the enslaved people on the McCaslin plantation. Old Carothers' sons Buck and Buddy, are reluctant to buy Tennie from Hubert Beauchamp because they "had so many niggers already" (7), but their reluctance extends to other aspects of slave-owning as well. |
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2793 | Unnamed Slaves on Beauchamp Plantation |
The Beauchamp property in Go Down, Moses is a large cotton plantation, with an unspecified but clearly large number of slaves who work either in the house or in the fields. "Four or five" of these slaves appear in "Was" when they bring horses for the hunt for Tomey's Turl. During the Civil War most of them leave; according to the narrator, the "ones that didn't go" are the ones that their master, Hubert Beauchamp, "could not have wanted" (287). |