Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust Little Belle is the young daughter of Belle and Harry Mitchell who, by the end, is Horace Benbow's step-daughter - though Belle herself makes it clear to her new acquaintances in the new town she lives in "that Horace is not her real daddy" (378). When she appears again in Sanctuary she is a young woman.

This character - V.K. Ratliff's partner in the Jefferson restaurant that ultimately becomes Flem's, and then later the town's night watchman - is named Aaron Rideout when he first appears, in The Hamlet. In the next two volumes of the Snopes trilogy he appears as Grover Cleveland Winbush. (When Random House published the trilogy in one volume in 1964, they regularized his character as Winbush in all three novels.)

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.

At the Sartoris Thanksgiving dinner in Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody mentions Abe as one of the gillies who help the gentlemen who come to fish his pond. ("Gilly" is a Scottish term for a servant who assists a fisherman.) When asked "how many [other black retainers] have you got," Peabody says "six or seven" adults, and an unspecified number of "scrubs" (i.e. children), but they are not named (303).

According to Requiem for a Nun, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Acey is a member of Rider's mill gang who is present at Mannie's funeral. He tries to offer comfort in the form of company and “a jug in de bushes” (239, 130).

In Intruder in the Dust Adam Fraser owns the "crossroads store" (18) near the scene of Vinson Gowrie's murder. Apparently he helps Constable Skipworth keep Lucas safe from harm until the sheriff can arrest him; that seems to be what Gavin means when he tells Lucas he was likely to come to grief "old Skipworth and Adam Fraser or not" (222).

Ad - Admiral Dewey Snopes - is one of Eck Snopes' children. He was named after a hero of the Spanish-American War.

Elly's grandmother - Elly's father's mother - lives in Elly's family's home in Jefferson, though she is formerly of Louisiana. Her given name is Ailanthia, as is that of the granddaughter after whom "Elly" is titled. Elly's grandmother is frequently described as cold: "cold, piercing" (209), with "that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf," having lost her hearing 15 years before the story takes place (212). The narrator calls her an "old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped" (223).

In As I Lay Dying Albert works at "the fountain" - that is, the counter where one can buy ice cream or a soda - in Moseley's drugstore in Mottson (199); he is also the person who tells Moseley about the altercation between the marshal and Anse in front of Grummet’s hardware store.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider's "Unc Alec" tells him that his aunt wants him to come home (249, 143). Alec is Rider's "aunt's husband," "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (245, 138).

One of the first white men in Yoknapatawpha, Alexander Holston established a tavern in Jefferson before the town had any name at all. The "Holston House" that survives in the town in the mid-20th century has had several remodelings, but is still run by descendants with the same last name - making them and the business the most definite point of continuity between Yoknapatawpha's past and its present.

In The Reivers Alexander is the youngest of Lucius Priest's three brothers, and still in diapers. His birth just before or during "last winter" is mentioned in the text (44).

This Alice cooks for Miss Ballenbaugh in The Reivers, and very well too: after eating her food, Lucius "knows why the hunters and fishermen come back" to stay at Ballenbaugh's inn (76). Unmarried, she says she "aint studying no husband" (75).

In The Hamlet the mother of Hoake McCarron, Alison McCarron, comes from wealth as her deceased mother was the daughter of a "well-to-do" landowner (149). At nineteen, she eloped with Mr. McCarron a gambler with no definite past, climbing out of a second-story window to avoid her father. Her story is omitted in The Mansion, where she is merely described as a "well-to-do" widow (139).

According to Aunt Jenny's story in Flags in the Dust, Allan is the Confederate officer who reminds General J.E.B. Stuart of his duty to the army in order to keep him from following Carolina Bayard on his reckless quest for anchovies.

Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) McCaslin is the son of Old Carothers McCaslin and the twin brother of Theophilus (Uncle Buck). He is an outstanding poker player, a good cook and housekeeper, and a less significant presence in the fiction that his brother. During the Civil War present of The Unvanquished Buddy is in Virginia fighting in Tennant's brigade after beating his brother in a card game for the privilege of serving in the Confederate regiment that was raised in Yoknapatawpha.

Andrew Jackson first achieved fame as a military leader in the War of 1812 with the British and in later conflicts with the Creek and the Seminole Indians. As commander of American forces in the 'old southwest,' which included Mississippi, he negotiated treaties with other tribes; "A Courtship" mentions the one he signed with the Chickasaw that lived in the region where Yoknapatawpha imaginatively exists. Jackson became the seventh President of the U.S.

Anse Bundren is a farmer by vocation, but he is perhaps more accurately described with a term Faulkner's fiction regularly applies to the Snopeses: parasite. Unlike Flem, however, Anse is rendered comically rather than as a threat to the social order. He is described as a "kind of tall, gaunted man" (203). Physically his most striking feature seems to be his hair; Peabody calls it "pushed and matted up . . . like a dipped rooster" (44).

Anse McCallum is one of Buddy McCallum's twin sons in "The Tall Men": "two absolutely identical blue-eyed youths" (49) who are mentioned together as "the twin McCallum nephews" of Rafe in "Knight's Gambit" (210). He also appears, but without any mention of his twin brother, The Town. In the first story he and his brother Lucius have identical histories. They are "wild as spikehorn bucks" as children (55). Later, they go to the agricultural college to learn how to raise whiteface cattle.

In "Smoke" Anselm Junior is one of the twin sons of Anselm Holland. He seems to have inherited his father's violent misanthropy along with his name, although he "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). He is the first of the twins to break with their father, moving "back into the hills" of Yoknapatawpha (5). He is "a dark, silent, aquiline-faced man" whom "both neighbors and strangers let severely alone" (6).

The number of children born on the Armstid farm in Frenchman's Bend is either four or five. A character in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" refers to them as "them chaps" (138), but at least one is a daughter: in "Spotted Horses," Ina May, the only one ever named, is twelve, and "big enough to take care of the little ones" while their mother is at Mrs. Littlejohn's nursing their father (178). Though unnamed, she plays the same role in The Hamlet. In Light in August there are five children, all born "in six years," and now "raised to man- and womanhood" (15).

In Absalom! Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner. Beardsley's name is also mentioned in Light in August.

In The Reivers Otis tells Lucius that Aunt Fittie, who took Corrie in after her mother's death, "might have been kin to some of us," but that isn't definite (153). She lives "in a house on the edge" a small town in Arkansas and prostitutes the "eleven or twelve" year-old Corrie to local men for fifty cents a visit (154).

Aunt Rachel never directly appears in "That Evening Sun." Quentin says she is "old," and lives in a cabin "by herself" near Nancy, smoking "a pipe in the door, all day long" (294). The "Aunt" in her name is clearly conventional, part of the way the Jim Crow culture stereotypes Negroes, but it's not clear whether she is "Jesus' mother": "Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn't any kin to Jesus" (294). Quentin's father suggests Nancy could "go to Aunt Rachel's" for safety, but that doesn't happen (306).

Though the narrator of Flags in the Dust and both Benbows call her "Aunt Sally," there is no sign of any nieces or nephews (168). She is the neighbor and old family friend who stays with Narcissa while Horace is in France. The narrator calls her "a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her intelligence with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1901" (168).

Mentioned in both The Sound and the Fury - where Jason Compson has a particular animus against him - and The Reivers George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr., played baseball for the New York Yankees from 1920-1934. During that time he was probably the most famous athlete in the U.S.

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).

The first Ballenbaugh in Yoknapatawpha is as colorful as the place that bears his name. Described in The Reivers as an "ancestryless giant," he arrived in the county "from nowhere" and by some means - the narrative implies a coercive one - took over the store and ferry run by a man named Wylie (72). Under his ownership, the place became a "roaring" one: a "grubbing station and saloon" for the wagon-drivers who passed through on the way to or from Memphis (72).

Tyler Ballenbaugh's "family" is mentioned when he first appears in "Hand upon the Waters," but no other details about them are given (75). The fact that Tyler is "married," however, means the family includes a wife (75).

This is the first of the four 'Bayards' on the Sartoris family tree. When Colonel John Sartoris' sister Virginia (Aunt Jenny) Du Pre comes to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina, she brings with her the story she loves to tell the younger members of her family about her bother Bayard's death in the Civil War. To her, at least, and in these stories, this Bayard is an incredibly romantic figure, likened to "Richard First . . . before he went crusading" (11). During the Civil War he is Gen. J.E.B.

Although this Bayard, the third on the Sartoris family tree, has a son, The Mansion, the second to last text Faulkner published, is not wrong to call this Bayard "the last Sartoris Mohican" (210). He appears or is mentioned in seven texts.

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet Beasley Kemp is a neighboring farmer with whom Ab Snopes does a horse trade.

Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294).

She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. "Beck" is presumably short for Rebecca. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes.

Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later.

Ben Quick is an inhabitant of Frenchman's Bend, though he appears differently in the two texts that mention him. In The Hamlet he is the father of Lon, a "hale burly old man" (92) who raises goats on his farm. In "Tomorrow," he is the father of Isham, and the owner of the sawmill in Frenchman's Bend.

In Flags in the Dust the Benbows are identified as one of the oldest and most prominent Yoknapatawpha families, though they do not figure among the county's large plantation owners, and individual members of that family play major roles in that novel, Sanctuary and "There Was a Queen." In "Skirmish at Sartoris," however, as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished,the family is mentioned only as the antebellum owners of a "carriage" and the slave - "Uncle Cash," or Cassius - who drove it (66).

Benjy Compson is one of the most original characters in American literature. To Mrs. Compson, who originally named him Maury in honor of her brother, Benjy's severe mental handicap is shameful, and a reason to change his name to Benjamin - apparently on her son Quentin's suggestion, though tellingly he gets the Biblical significance of the name Benjamin wrong.

In "Hair" Bidwell is the storekeeper in Division who has the key to the Starnes's house; he shows the narrator around it, and "opens the Bible" which records the mortgage payments Hawkshaw made (146).

In Intruder in the Dust Bilbo Gowrie and his brother Vardaman are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). The novel consistently treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body.

In "Monk" Bill Terrel is described as "a tall man, a huge man, with a dark aquiline face like an Indian's except for the pale yellow eyes and a shock of wild, black hair" who speaks in a "queer, high, singsong filled with that same abject arrogance" that characterizes his appearance (55). He convinces Monk to kill the Warden. He seems to serve as a foil for Monk - Terrel owns a gas station, and Monk works at one; he yearns for a pardon, and Monk refuses one; he trusts no one, and Monk trusts everyone.

Birdie Watts runs the brothel "across the street" from Miss Reba's in The Reivers (107).

In "Pantaloon in Black" as both a story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, the man Rider kills belongs to the large Yoknapatawpha family of Birdsongs; the deputy sheriff tells his wife how large it is: "It's more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There's forty-two active votes in that connection" (148). As voters the men in the family have a lot of influence with the county sheriff, but it's clear from both what the deputy says and the events of the story that as a clan the Birdsongs aren't going to rely on the law to punish Rider for killing one of their own.

In The Town this unnamed Bishop "boy" is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He is identified as "the youngest Bishop," but the novel says nothing about the others in his family (222). (In The Mansion a man named Ephriam Bishop is the sheriff.)

One of the men who regularly join Major de Spain's hunting parties. He is identified in The Reivers only by the adjective "old" (20). His relationship to Will Legate, who appears in other texts and is also known as a hunter, is not explained.

In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning).

This "solid, well-to-do farmer, husband and father" from Frenchman's Bend is Gavin Stevens' client in "Tomorrow" (90). There is no way to determine if he is Odum or Homer or Cal, or yet a different member of the Bookwright|Bookright family. This Bookwright turned himself in after shooting Buck Thorpe to keep him from eloping with his daughter; the story begins during his trial for that crime.

The character of Boon Hogganbeck is essentially the same in all seven of his appearances in the fiction, though in one of them ("The Bear") his name is Hoggenbeck, and his lineage changes in another. In every text he has an Indian grandmother, but when he first appears, in "Lion," she is a "Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land" (184). Beginning with his next appearance, in "The Old People," Faulkner lowers her rank: Boon's blood, the narrator says, "is not a chief's blood" (203).