Character Keys

Displaying 1001 - 1100 of 3748

Add a new Character Key

Code titlesort descending biography
3050 Roz Thompson

In Light in August Roz is the grandson of Pappy Thompson; he is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull.

1771 Ruby Lamar

Ruby Lamar is a former Memphis prostitute who appears in Sanctuary as the devoted common-law wife of Lee Goodwin and conscientious mother of their very young child. Earlier she moved to San Francisco and New York to wait for Lee while he was serving overseas, and when he is sentenced to prison for killing fellow U.S. soldier in a fight over another woman, she not only moves to Leavenworth to be near him, but hires a lawyer for him, using her body as payment. When Lee is arrested for killing Tommy, she is prepared to pay Horace the same way.

874 Rufus Pruitt

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. In "Tomorrow" Rufus Pruitt is a working-class farmer, a sharecropper's son. He and his mother narrate part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin to solve the mystery of Stonewall Jackson Fentry's behavior.

3046 Russell

In Light in August Russell works in the Sheriff Kennedy's office and gossips about Mrs. Hines's visit.

40 Saddie

One of Elnora's three children in the short story "There Was a Queen," Saddie works as Miss Jenny's caretaker, "tending her as though she were a baby" (728). "Saddie" may be a corruption of 'Saturday.' She sleeps in the big house, "on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre's bed" (728). Genealogically, she is Miss Jenny's great-niece, the illegitimate granddaughter of her brother John, though that relationship is not discussed by any of the characters. (In the earlier novel Flags in the Dust, Elnora has only one child - Isom.)

232 Saint Elmo Snopes

As a child, a hulking and "bear-shaped" figure, Saint Elmo eats all of the candy in Varner's case (350). A son of I.O. Snopes from his first marriage, he appears only in The Hamlet. (The names of the various Snopeses come from a variety of sources; Saint Elmo's name comes from the title of an 1866 novel by Georgia author Augusta Jane Evans.)

3774 Saint Francis

"Saint Francis" - known as Francis of Assisi, the Catholic friar who founded the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century - wrote the words that Quentin Compson remembers on the first page of his section in The Sound and the Fury in the song "The Canticle of the Sun": "All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape."

3265 Sally Hampton Priest

Sally Priest, an abused married woman, receives a corsage from Grenier Weddel and a black eye from her husband; according to Gowan Stevens' account, "you would even have thought she was proud of it" (81). Her maiden name, "Sally Hampton" (80), suggests she is related to the Hamptons who are county sheriffs in other fictions, but if Faulkner imagined her in that relation, the text gives no hint of it.

2744 Sally Rand

Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).

3047 Salmon

Salmon is the owner of a garage in Mottstown in Light in August. He offers to rent a car to Doc and Mrs. Hines for three dollars but also tells them they can take the train "for fiftytwo cents apiece" (358).

2541 Sam

Although the narrator of The Hamlet calls the Varner's cook the "only servant of any sort in the whole district" (11), the Varner's also have a manservant. Among his jobs is carrying Eula "until she was five or six": "the negro man staggering slightly beneath his long, dangling, already indisputably female burden" (106).

3659 Sam Caldwell

A regular customer of Miss Corrie's in The Reivers, Sam Caldwell is a "flagman" on "the Memphis Special," a train that runs to New York (127). He owes his job to his uncle, a "division superintendent" on the rail line (127), but shows himself as generous and kind when he helps the adventurers smuggle their horse to Parsham and again throughout their misadventures once they get there. Lucius says he is "almost as big as Boon" (135), and Boon sees him as a rival for Corrie's affections.

114 Sam Fathers

This is not the Indian named "Had-Two-Fathers" who plays a minor role in "Red Leaves." This is the character best known as Sam Fathers, though as he tells Quentin Compson in Faulkner's second Indian story, "A Justice," his Indian name was "Had-Two-Fathers" too (345). In that story he is the child of a Choctaw named Crawfish-ford and an enslaved woman whom Doom, the chief, won gambling on a Mississippi riverboat.

472 Samson 1

There is a Frenchman's Bend character named "Samson" in both As I Lay Dying, where he narrates a section of the narrative, and Light in August, where only his name appears. In the first novel, he lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. The barn suggests he is farmer, but when his section begins he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112), which may mean he also owns a country store.

931 Samson 2

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

205 Samuel Beauchamp's Mother

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that name in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's unnamed mother was the oldest daughter of Lucas and Mollie Beauchamp; she dies while giving birth to him. In "A Point of Law," Lucas and Molly Beauchamp have at least one child besides Nat; we are assuming this child is the daughter who gives birth to Samuel, though the story's only reference to her is ambiguous. According to the narrator, it is known that Lucas has "one daughter with grandchildren" (214).

1299 Samuel Worsham

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Miss Worsham tells Stevens that Mollie "gave [her grandson] my father's name" (261, 358). The narrative tells us that Samuel Worsham left his daughter Belle "the decaying house" she continues to live in (260, 356).

2677 Samuel Worsham Beauchamp

In both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

164 Samuel Worsham Beauchamp

In "Go Down, Moses," and again in the chapter with that title in the novel Go Down, Moses - the only texts he appears in - Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (256, 351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

2308 Sarah

Sarah - Uncle Rodney's older sister, George's wife and woman whom the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls "mamma" (265) - is greatly upset by Rodney's behavior, mostly because gossip about it would damage "the family's good name" (267). She is very class-conscious, but also genuinely concerned about her younger brother: "mamma cried and said how Uncle Rodney was the baby and that must be why papa hated him" (268).

757 Sarah Burden

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

153 Sarah Edmonds Priest

Lucius' paternal Grandmother in The Reivers is an Edmonds by birth, which accounts for the fact that the Priests belong to the "cadet branch" of the McCaslin-Edmonds family (17). Married at fifteen, she is now "just past fifty" (41). While afraid at first of the family's new car, she soon learns to enjoy riding in it - until the first (and last) time the wind blows her husband's expectorated tobacco juice into her face.

200 Sartoris Womenfolks

Other than Colonel John, the only Sartorises referred to in Absalom! are "Sartoris' womenfolks," who use their "silk dresses" to sew the regimental flag that Yoknapatawpha's Confederate volunteers carry to the Civil War (63).

1323 Sebastian Gualdres

In "Knight's Gambit" Sebastian Gualdres is "the Argentine cavalry captain" whom Mrs. Harriss and her children meet in South America after Mr. Harriss’s death (170). He is one of the more exotic figures to appear in Yoknapatawpha. The narrative notes the stereotypical assumptions that the people of Yoknapatawpha have about him as "a Latin" (174), but in its depiction of his courtesy, his pride and his machismo, the narrative itself seems not unwilling to reinforce the stereotypes.

2336 Secretary

In "Uncle Willy" Secretary is the name of the "negro boy" whom Willy hires to drive his car (235). In Faulkner's South, even adult black men are often called "boys" by white people, so although the juvenile narrator says that Secretary is "about my size" (235), he also says that Secretary is "older than me" (241) - though we have no way to know how much older. Both the narrator and Willy describe Secretary as "burr-headed," i.e. with short, bristly hair (235).

3417 Sergeant Crack

In The Mansion this man (who will be elected Captain Lendon's "First Sergeant" in the Sartoris Rifles) tells what happens in 1916 when Lendon and Tug Nightingale try to convince Tug's father to let him join "the Yankee army" (204).

476 Sergeant Harrison

In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, the top sergeant in the Union troop that arrives at Sartoris is named Harrison. He may be the Yankee who is first spotted by Ringo and Bayard looking at the plantation through field glasses; if so, it is his horse that they kill attempting to shoot him. He was clearly angered by that shooting, which cost the regiment "the best horse in the whole army" (29). Much more hostile to Rosa Millard than his commanding officer, he orders other soldiers to search the house in search of the "little devils" who did the shooting (29).

1781 Shack

On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford in Sanctuary are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). One is unnamed, but he calls the other one "Shack," presumably a nickname derived from the confectionery near the college campus (169). "Shack" whistles a "broken dance rhythm" that the narrator calls "meaningless, vertiginous" (169-70).

831 Sheriff Hampton 1

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson. In either case, this is the earliest Hampton, who is is county sheriff in two novels, both set around the turn into the 20th century: The Hamlet and The Reivers.

381 Sheriff Hampton 2

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson.

835 Sheriff Hampton 3

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson. This youngest of them is definitely the son of a Sheriff Hampton in both the novels in which he appears.

833 Sheriff Hampton's Daughter

The married daughter of Sheriff and Mrs. Hampton lives in Memphis, where she is expecting a child during the events of Intruder in the Dust.

3039 Sheriff Watt Kennedy

The county sheriff in Light in August is named Watt Kennedy. Described as a "fat, comfortable man" (287), "with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face" (420), he investigates the murder of Joanna Burden and pursues Joe Christmas across the countryside (287). Like so many other characters in this novel, he never appears elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

3400 Shreve MacKenzie|McCannon

Shreve is Quentin Compson's Canadian roommate at Harvard in two of Faulkner's greatest novels: The Sound and the Fury (where his last name is MacKenzie) and Absalom, Absalom! (where it's McCannon). In the first novel he's largely defined by his concern for Quentin's well-being, which apparently leads some of their fellow students in the novel (and has definitely led a few critics writing about the novel) to speculate that the bond between them may be homoerotic.

3456 Shuford H. Stillwell

In The Mansion Stillwell is the "gambler who had cut the throat of a Vicksburg prostitute" who is an inmate in Parchman Penitentiary at the same time as Mink (107). He is the ringleader of the group of prisoners who try to break out, and the only one who escapes successfully. Subsequently he threatens to kill Mink when Mink is finally released.

1506 Sibleigh

In Flags in the Dust Sibleigh serves in France with the Sartoris twins in the Royal Air Force during World War I. He agrees to serve as flying bait to lure Ploeckner into Bayard's sights. (He also appears in the non-Yoknapatawpha fiction "With Honor and Dispatch.")

2747 Sickymo

Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.

1655 Simmons

In The Sound and the Fury Mr. Simmons (whom Jason calls "old man Simmons," 216) possesses the key to the old opera house that Jason borrows.

3048 Simms

In Light in August Simms may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill.

3210 Simon

The Simon who appears in "Race at Morning" is not Simon Strother, who appears in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished. Like that earlier 'Simon,' however, he is a servant, one of black cooks for the white deer hunters. He also handles the hunting dogs while the white hunters pursue deer.

3041 Simon McEachern

In Light in August Simon McEachern is more than forty years old when he adopts the five-year-old Joe Christmas from the Memphis orphanage and takes him to the farm where he and his wife live. The narrative describes him as "somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless" (143-44). His voice is that "of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence" (142).

34 Simon Strother

Simon first appears, in Flags in the Dust, as the elderly father of Elnora and Caspey and the coachman and butler at the Sartoris place where he has lived his whole life. He is defined by his loyalty to both the Sartorises and his own appetites. The grandson of Joby, Simon was born a slave, but he has only good memories of the old plantation, and still calls Colonel Sartoris "Marse John" when he talks to him, and he still talks to him although "Marse John" has been dead for forty years (112).

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.

1632 Sis Beulah Clay

Frony mentions "Sis Beulah Clay" to Caddy and her brothers in The Sound and the Fury when she tries to explain what a "funeral" is (33). When Sis Beulah Clay died, "they moaned two days" (33). "Sis" implies this woman belonged to the same church as Dilsey's family.

1501 Sis Rachel

Physically described as "mountainous" (26) and identified as one of Jefferson's best cooks in Flags in the Dust, Rachel works for Belle and Harry Mitchell, and makes no effort to disguise her preference for Harry over his wife.

2335 Sister Schultz

"Sister Schultz" in "Uncle Willy" is probably Reverend Schultz' wife (229). Like "Brother Schultz" and "Brother Miller" (229, 227), the title "Sister" most likely is a ceremonial title, indicating their fellowship as members of the same church.

480 Skeet MacGowan|Skeets Magowan

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.

2715 Smith and Jones

"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames. In "Delta Autumn," Don Boyd uses them to suggest how widespread are the contemporary political threats to the U.S. (269). In the revised version of the story that appears in Go Down, Moses, the character who mentions them is Roth Edmonds (322).

3452 Smith, Father of McKinley

McKinley Smith in The Mansion is the "son of an east Texas tenant farmer" (373).

284 Snopes 1

The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules in As I Lay Dying is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," this farmer is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192) - if so, he is Flem's only nephew or niece in the fictions.

294 Snopes 2

The one member of the Snopes family who appears in "Shingles for the Lord" is not given a first name, and only given two minor roles to play in the story: he brings the ladder to the church in his wagon (38), and is among the members of the congregation who are there to watch as the church burns down (41).

297 Snopes 3

This is one of the two Snopeses in The Town whose place in the family is impossible to determine. He is mentioned in connection with Ab Snopes' moving into Frenchman's Bend: "another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm" that Ab had been working (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible.

301 Snopes 4

The Mansion calls this Snopes "the last" in the sequence of Snopeses who move from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson, and also "the old one" (136). He is extremely choleric: "fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red" as soon as he felt challenged (136). He doesn't actually move into town, but reaches a point "in sight of the town clock" and then refuses to go further (136), settling into a place where he can wage war against the boys who try to raid his "water-melon patch" (137). Some people think he is "Mr Flem's father" (i.e.

296 Snopes, Brother of Mink

In The Mansion Mink Snopes tells the prison warden that Montgomery Ward Snopes is "my brother's grandson" (99). This is the only reference to Mink's brother in the fictions, and chronologically the possibility that a brother of Mink would have a grandchild Montgomery Ward's age is unlikely. Ratliff asks Montgomery Ward if Mink is his "cousin or uncle" (71); Montgomery refuses to answer, but in his own narrative chapter he refers to Mink as "Uncle Mink" (103).

2508 Snopes, Descendants of Ab

Many of the many Snopeses who appear in the fictions are "descendants" of Ab Snopes (6), but the specific group referred to in "Barn Burning" is made up of the unnamed Snopeses who are alive in "later years," later, that is to say, than the first introduction of automobiles into Yoknapatawpha - i.e. sometime after about 1920 (6). The narrative notes that the "same quality" that makes Ab handle his mules badly will characterize the way these future Snopeses try to "put a motor car into motion" (6).

277 Snopes, Mother of Eck

The mother of Eck is mentioned in The Hamlet because when Eck's first wife dies, Eck leaves their son, Wallstreet Panic, with his mother to raise, but she plays that role outside the narrative. She is also mentioned in the other two volumes in the Snopes trilogy, again in terms of something that happens outside the narrative, if it happens at all. Because Eck is such a good and generous person, in The Town Gavin Stevens declares that he 'must' be illegitimate, that his mother was committing adultery with someone not named Snopes when he was conceived.

186 Snopes, Twin Sister of Net

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure.

3312 Snopeses

There are more Snopeses in the fictions than any other family. Over 60 named members of the family have their own entries in our database.

1508 Sol

In Flags in the Dust Sol is the porter who helps Horace with his luggage when he returns to Jefferson from France.

745 Solon Quick

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. This entry is for Solon, who appears in three Yoknapatawpha fictions as one of the farmers in the Bend. He is a major character in the comic "Shingles for the Lord," where he and Res Grier try to out-smart each other in a dog-and-work swapping transaction.

122 Sometimes-Wakeup

Sometimes-Wakeup is one of Doom's two uncles in "A Justice," the brother of the Man prior to Doom, and he lives "by himself in a cabin by the creek" (349). He is apparently a recluse, whom the People only see when they take him food. After Doom murders the Man and the Man's son, Sometimes-Wakeup is next in the order of succession, though he declines to accept the position.

2483 Son of Bill Terrel

At his murder trial in "Monk," Bill Terrel tries to blame his son for the crime. This son both denies the charge and "proves an alibi," resulting in his father's conviction (59).

240 Son of Byron Snopes 1

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

241 Son of Byron Snopes 2

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

1769 Son of Lee and Ruby

The narrator of Sanctuary tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135).

1463 Son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins

In The Unvanquished the son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins' was killed in "almost the last battle" of the Civil War, which would have been sometime in 1865 (214). When he died, he was about the same age as Bayard is in "An Odor of Verbena."

3700 Son Thomas

In The Reivers Son Thomas is "the youngest driver" who works at Maury Priest's livery stable (4). The "Son" in his name is not connected to any specific parents.

2325 Sonny Barger

Since his store is on or near the street in Jefferson that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Nigger Row," it's possible that Sonny Barger is black, but more likely that he is one of Jefferson's white small businessmen who cater to poor people of both races - like Willy in his drugstore (234). The fact that Barger sells the narrator a bottle of "Jamaica ginger" - a legal form of alcohol - suggests a seedy kind of establishment (234).

2228 Sophia Allison

The mother of Judge Allison in "Beyond," Sophia, was a sickly woman and highly overprotective of her son. Howard's aunts ran the house, patronizing Sophia and keeping Howard under control; Sophia herself is also very controlling of her son. On those occasions when she allowed him to go barefoot outside, for example, "I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life" (790).

1518 Sophia Wyatt

Sally Wyatt's older sister is named Sophia in Flags in the Dust; she runs the household in which the three elderly Wyatt sisters live "in a capable shrewish fashion" (175).

1983 Sophie Starnes

In "Hair," Sophie Starnes is the daughter of landowners in Alabama. She is said to be a "thin, unhealthy" girl, with "straight hair not brown and not yellow" (139). Over her mother's objections, she becomes engaged to Henry Stribling - AKA Hawkshaw - the "son of a tenant farmer" (138). Before they can marry, however, Sophie dies of "some kind of fever" (138).

148 Sophonsiba Beauchamp

In Go Down, Moses Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She is named Sophonsiba after white mistress of the plantation where Tennie was enslaved. In 1886, at the age of seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike McCaslin finds her and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments. Although Ike attempts to remove her from the squalor of her new life in Arkansas, her priorities are evident in the two words she offers in return: "I'm free" (267).

137 Sophonsiba Beauchamp McCaslin

Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their plantation be called "Warwick," as a claim on the family's purported connection to English royalty. The onstage role she plays in Go Down, Moses tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12).

2290 Spilmer

Spilmer may or may not still be alive, but the property above the ravine ditch where Mannie Hait hides and shoots a mule bears his name in both "Mule in the Yard" and The Town.

1656 Spoade I

In The Sound and the Fury Spoade is the last name of a senior at Harvard College with Quentin in 1910. He jokingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband" (78). Quentin says Spoade has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), but he never thinks of him except as "Spoade" - his first name is never given. He is from South Carolina, and lives up to the image of a southern aristocrat in a number of ways besides his name, including the fact that he goes to chapel every day in dishabille.

3454 Spoade II

This is the younger Spoade, who in The Mansion follows his father's footsteps from South Carolina to Harvard. He is a classmate of Charles Mallison; he invites Charles "to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like" (229). (The Saint Cecilia Society in Charleston is an upper class social club that was originally organized in 1766; its annual balls have been around since 1820.)

1657 Squire

In The Sound and the Fury the local justice of the peace or magistrate who hears the complaint against Quentin involving Julio's sister is referred to only as "Squire" (139). His courtroom is "a bare room smelling of stale tobacco" and "a scarred littered table," the book in which he enters Quentin's name is a "huge dusty" one, and he himself has "a fierce roach of iron gray hair" and wears "steel spectacles" (142). He fines Quentin but releases him without a formal charge.

1979 Starneses in Alabama

In "Hair," the Starneses in Division have "kin" (140) elsewhere in Alabama. The storekeeper and other neighbors in Division wonder if these folks will claim the Starnes house after Mrs. Starnes' death.

270 Stevens, Grandfather of Gavin

The Stevenses are one of the older Yoknapatawpha families, but there is confusion about its earlier members. The first appearance of a Stevens is in "A Rose for Emily"; he is the eighty-year-old mayor of Jefferson referred to as "Judge Stevens" (122). According to Brooks, Dasher and Kirk, three of the scholars who create charts or indices of Faulkner's characters, this man is the same Judge Stevens who is Gavin's father in half a dozen other fictions.

2661 Stonewall Jackson Fentry

Jackson Fentry is farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," refuses to acquit the Bookwright, who has shot and killed Buck Thorpe for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter. It is discovered that to Fentry, Buck is the son he adopted from a young but dying poor-white woman to whom decades earlier he took in and married just before she died. The son was taken from him at three years of age, to grow up (badly) as a Thorpe, but to him the murdered man is still "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" (100).

993 Stovall

In "That Evening Sun," Mr. Stovall, the cashier in the Jefferson bank and "a deacon in the Baptist church," knocks Nancy to the ground and "kicks her in the mouth" when she accuses him of having failed to pay her for sex (291). In Requem for a Nun, where Nancy reappears as a major character, Temple Drake re-tells this event; she does not name the man, but refers to him as a "pillar of the church" (96).

75 Stuart MacCallum

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Rafe, Stuart is named after the famous Confederate cavalry general, J.E.B. Stuart. He also appears in As I Lay Dying, but not as Stuart - because Samson cannot remember his first name. Like his brothers, he is a 'tall man': honorable, strong, stoic.

2916 Sudley Workitt

The man who owns the timber that Vinson and Crawford Gowrie are harvesting in Intruder in the Dust is first referred to as "Uncle Sudley Workitt" (215), and later identified as the boys' mother's "second or fourth cousin or uncle or something" (217). He is described as "an old rheumatic man" and "half blind" (219).

1511 Sue

Either Hub's daughter or, less likely, his sister. She does not appear in Flags in the Dust, but Hub tells his wife that Sue will "have to milk" the cow because he is going to town with Bayard and Suratt (138).

3397 Suratt, Family of V.K.

In the story V.K. Suratt tells in Flags in the Dust about Doctor Peabody amputating his grandfather's leg, he mentions that the whiskey and (presumably) the pain caused "granpappy" to "cuss and sing so scandalous" that "the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn" until the operation was over (136). (Suratt himself appears frequently in the fictions, in the later ones as V.K. Ratliff. His character remains essentially the same, but in those later fictions the Ratliff family is different from this Suratt one.)

3398 Suratt, Grandfather of V.K.

While drinking moonshine with Young Bayard and Hub in Flags in the Dust, V.K. Suratt tells them about the time Doctor Peabody amputated his "granpappy's laig," using whiskey as the anesthetic (136).

3399 Suratt, Oldest Brother of V.K.

V.K. Suratt's "oldest brother" appears briefly in Flags in the Dust as the person who taught him how "to chop cotton" fast if he wanted to keep from losing his toes (137).

1980 Susan Reed

Susan Reed is an orphan who is taken care of by the Burchett family in "Hair"; possibly she is their niece or cousin, but the narrator hints that she may be the illegitimate child of either Mr. or Mrs. Burchett. We first encounter her as a "thin little girl," "about five" years old, with "big scared eyes," and "straight, soft hair, not blonde and not brunette" (131). Once she reaches adolescence, however, her innocent look disappears and she becomes promiscuous, with "flimsy off-color clothes" and a "face watchful and bold and discreet all at once" (135).

93 Sutpen Ancestors and Descendants

After the young Thomas Sutpen is turned away from the front door of the Tidewater plantation house in Absalom!, he suddenly recognizes his responsibility to "all the men and women that had died to make him" and "all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead" (178).

89 Sutpen Infant 1

At the time the Sutpens begin traveling east in Absalom!, this youngest member of the family "couldn't even walk yet" (180). The novel's sequence of events implies that his mother died giving birth to him or her, and that death precipitated the father's decision to move back to Tidewater - but that isn't made explicit.

90 Sutpen Infant 2

This is the first of the two illegitimate Sutpen children in Absalom! that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to during the family's journey across Virginia; he or she was born in "a cowshed" (183).

91 Sutpen Infant 3

This is the second of the two illegitimate Sutpen children that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to before the family reaches the end of their journey in the Tidewater area of Virginia.

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.

64 T.P. Gibson

T.P. (Faulkner never explains what the initials stand for) is the second son of Dilsey and Roskus, and like them lives as a servant on the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury. As a young man he takes his brother Versh's place as Benjy's caretaker, and helps his father with the Compsons' horses and cow. In 1910 he gets memorably drunk on the champagne - "sassprilluh," T. P. calls it (37) - that has been bought for Caddy's wedding. In 1928 he no longer lives on the Compson property, but still drives the carriage for Mrs. Compson's Sunday afternoon trips to the cemetery.

225 Temple and Gowan's Daughter

When Requiem for a Nun begins, the baby daughter of Gowan and Temple Drake Stevens has been murdered by Nancy.

223 Temple Drake Stevens

As Temple Drake, she is the principal character in Sanctuary (1931); as Temple Drake Stevens, she is at the center of the dramatic portions of Requiem for a Nun. She is (as she says frequently in the first novel) the daughter of a judge, a member of an aristocratic family, and a very complex young woman. In the first novel she is a seventeen-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the heir to southern traditions trying on the contemporary role of flapper.

1434 Tennant

All we know about this Confederate brigade commander mentioned in The Unvanquished is that when John Sartoris returns to Mississippi after being demoted by his troops, "Uncle Buddy" McCaslin apparently stays behind as a sergeant "in Tennant's brigade in Virginia" (51).

139 Tennie Beauchamp

Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin.

147 Tennie's Jim|James Beauchamp

Although always a minor character, this black man reveals a lot about how Faulkner's imagination led him into and out of the haunted issue of slavery and its legacy. In his first published appearance he is "Tennie's Jim" in the hunting story "The Bear"; in that character he's a revised version of "Jimbo," one of the servants Major de Spain takes with him in "The Old People" on his annual hunting trips into the big woods.

2748 The Jew

Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).

Pages