Character Keys

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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."

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).

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).

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).

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, and raise him there after her death.

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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."

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

The "chaplain" who marries Philip and Melisandre in "My Grandmother Millard" is an officer serving in Forrest's troop (699).

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).

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).

"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.

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).

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.)

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).

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).

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).

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.