Character Keys

In The Sound and the Fury the invisible "caddie" who is called by the golfers while Luster looks for the quarter never specifically appears. In a sense he exists in Benjy's section in name only, whenever the golfers on the course beside the Compson yard call "caddie" (3). The fact that whenever this name is called Benjy instead hears "Caddy" makes this and the book's other "caddies" major characters in his mind.

At the "little cafe down by the depot" in Mottstown in Light in August, this "cafe man" serves dinner to Doc and Mrs. Hines and suggests they hire a car to take them to Jefferson rather than wait for the train (359).

In Sartoris' memory of his training as an aviator in "All the Dead Pilots," this man, who seems like a figure in a tall tale, was injured when "a cadet crashed on top of him" during flying practice in Canada (526).

Although "Elly" begins and ends on the road between Jefferson and Mills City, the only other drivers mentioned in the story are referred to, obliquely, at the very end, after the accident, when Elly thinks, "They won't even stop to see if I am hurt" (224). Their presence is indicated only by the "snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel" that she hears on the road above her (223).

The Reivers says little about the "owner of the car" that was the first automobile ever seen in Jefferson, other than that he drove down from Memphis and that he trusts Buffaloe with the car for two weeks (26).

In "Knight's Gambit" Harriss rents the plantation he inherits from his father-in-law to this "caretaker," a man who "didn’t even live in the county" but commutes from Memphis except during planting and harvest season, when he camps out in one the abandoned Negro cabins (159-60).

In Flags in the Dust this carnival employee is mentioned in Narcissa's account of the time Johnny Sartoris flew over Yoknapatawpha in a balloon. John does that when ptomaine poisoning makes the man to ill to fly the balloon himself.

The man with whom Caddy's daughter Quentin runs away from home works for the "show" that performs in Jefferson over the Easter weekend. In The Sound and the Fury, he is identified in both Benjy's and Jason's sections by his "red tie" (49, 232). He is only mentioned in the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, as a "pitchman in a travelling streetshow" (330), but this text adds a detail to his biography: when he left with Miss Quentin, he "was already under sentence for bigamy" (342).

When in Flags in the Dust Old Bayard finds his ancestor's rapier in the chest of family relics, he thinks of the first Sartoris in the new world, raising tobacco and fighting "his stealthy and simple neighbors" (88). That ancestor lived in Carolina (whether North or more probably South is never specified), and the adjectives "stealthy and simple" make it almost certain that he is thinking about the Indians who were ab-originally on that scene.

In The Mansion McKinley Smith hires a "professional" carpenter to help him build his house (374).

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).

In "Shall Not Perish" the narrator recalls, briefly, how Rosa Millard bravely "stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war" (112). Usually, carpetbaggers are associated with the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, while in The Unvanquished Rosa dies before the end of the war.

According to The Town, when Major de Spain returns from the Spanish-American War determined to modernize Jefferson, "nothing had happened in [the town] since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another renegade Mississippian" (11). 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.

In The Mansion these two cattle-buyers are brought in as experts to establish the value of the heifer that Mink Snopes wintered in Houston's pasture.

The Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse in Go Down, Moses hears the divorce petition that Roth Edmonds has put forth for Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is described as “quite old” (123).

In The Mansion Gavin Stevens checks the deed for Meadowfill's property in "the Chancery Clerk's office" - which is the only way this official appears in the novel (367). Typically, a chancery clerk would have been elected to his position. His job would have had him collecting data and presiding over the chancery court records, which would have dealt with disputes adjudicated in the court, centering on land and contracts.

In Sanctuary six "liveried chauffeurs" - all presumably employed by a funeral home - drive the otherwise empty "Packard touring cars" that follow the hearse carrying Red's body to the cemetery (249). The odds are good that Faulkner imagined them as Negroes, like the other drivers and chauffeurs in his fictions, but in this text their race is not specified.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp is convicted of and executed for shooting and killing a "Chicago policeman" (259, 356).

The people whom Sam Fathers calls "the People" and whom the story's title refers to as "The Old People" are the Chickasaw Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the white settlers arrived in the 1830s. As a tribe they have disappeared from the land, but a cherished part of the narrator's apprenticeship to Sam consists of the stories the old man tells him about this "race," whom neither of them "had ever known" but who survive in the traditions that Sam passes on (204).

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).

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

In "A Justice," "the People" is the collective term for Doom's tribal members, and they are differentiated from "the black people" (351, 355). The People as a tribe are also often segregated by gender, as when "all the men sleep in the House" (350), or when on the way to the steamboat, the women walk while the men ride in wagons (351). In this early story the Indians are identified as Choctaws; later Faulkner will consistently refer to the Indians who lived in the land that became Yoknapatawpha as Chickasaws.

"Indians had owned it" (90) - in The Hamlet this refers specifically to Houston's land, but historically the Chickasaw Indians occupied most of the land in what became northern Mississippi (including the area in which Faulkner locates Yoknapatawpha). Under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson they were "removed" beyond the Mississippi RIver, and most of the tribe was gone from Mississippi by the mid-1830s.

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

The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In "A Name for the City" their interactions with the story's white characters they are depicted as friendly. After "ceding" their lands to the newcomers (200), however, they will be 'removed' from the region by the Indian policy of President Jackson's administration - or, as the narrator puts it at the outset of the tale, these "dispossessed people" "emigrated to Oklahoma in the thirties" (202).

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

Nothing definite is said in "Smoke" about the "child" in Battenburg who was run down by the man hired to kill Judge Dunkenfield (31), but based on the fact that narrator doesn't specify race and the aggressive reaction of the people who arrest the driver, this child was presumably white.

The hands and feet of this child whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" have been scarred by "the other children . . . one day when they were playing" (794). He likes to play with his toy soldiers, one of which is named Pilate, given to him by "an old gentleman who has lived here a long time" (793). A querulous little boy, he seems at the moment mostly "tired of his toys" (793). Like his mother, he evokes the story of Christ, with which the judge has struggled during his adult life.

In The Mansion Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children" are sent back to Jefferson and end up wreaking havoc (327). That story is told in detail in The Town, where they are somewhat more clearly individualized: one, probably the oldest, is a girl, two are boys, while no one is sure about the sex of the youngest. (See the entries for Byron Snopes' Daughter, Bryron Snopes' Son(1), Byron Snopes' Son(2) and Byron Snopes' Youngest Child in this index.)

In The Unvanquished these are the children of the "hill man" whom Colonel Sartoris shoots after the War; they live with their mother in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221).

The cotton farmer with whom Mink briefly stays in The Mansion has five children between the ages of "five or six and twelve" (438). All five work with their parents picking cotton. Only one is individuated by the narrative: the "oldest girl" (440), who is the "twelve-year-old" and who helps her mother prepare supper (441).

This "Chinese laundryman" mentioned in The Town is the only Asian character who appears in Yoknapatawpha. Charles Mallison explains why, although he is not white, this man is in a category that is distinct from the one that the other non-white - i.e. Negro - inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha belong to: "And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even kindless, half the world or anyway half the continent . . . sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule" (321).

In "A Justice" the "boy with a branch" and the "another boy with a branch" have distinct jobs from the rest of the tribe, personally attending to Doom by providing shade and chasing away bugs (354).

The only native American character mentioned in Flags in the Dust, this "Choctaw woman" gave Will Falls' grandmother the recipe for an ointment "nigh a hundred and thutty years ago" (227). That would be around 1790, at which time the Choctaw was one of the major tribes living in the southeastern U.S, including Mississippi. They inhabit Yoknapatawpha in Faulkner's earliest fictions. However, historically the tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha was the Chickasaw, and in his later fictions Faulkner uses that name instead.

These are the "preachers" and the "Jesus shouters" in "Beyond" whom Mothershed rails against; he blames them for the fact that he found himself in Beyond after committing suicide (786).

This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator of "A Bear Hunt" as "scurrying and screaming" when, some twenty years earlier, the Provine gang would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).

In Intruder in the Dust Chick sees the white people who go to the churches in Jefferson on Sunday morning as "men in their dark suits and women in silks and parasols and girls and young men two and two, flowing and decorous" (41).

One of the three people in Sanctuary who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit is "a cigar-clerk" (311). We learn nothing about his testimony, or whether he is sincerely mistaken.

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman imagines that he can jump from the porch to the barn "like the pink lady in the circus" (54) - an acrobat he has presumably seen at a show in town in the past.

In The Reivers the people who live in the vicinity of Ballenbaugh's and seek to close it down include "sheriffs" (who campaign on the promise to run Ballenbaugh and his crew out of Yoknapatawpha), "angry farmers" (who know their livestock is being stolen by that crew), and "ministers and old ladies" (who object to the place on moral grounds, 73). On the other hand, Lucius tells his grandson that "sensible people" from further away were willing to allow the place to exist (74).

Requiem for a Nun notes when the "sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk" (35), the "bailiffs" (36), and the other officials of Jefferson occupy the newly constructed courthouse (35).

On behalf of the railroad company, this claims adjuster in "Mule in the Yard" pays Mannie Hait the sum of $8500 after her husband gets run over by one of their trains. On this occasion he also thwarts I.O. Snopes, by refusing to pay anything for the mules who were killed in the accident.

The boys and girls who are Minnie Cooper's "contemporaries" and "schoolmates" begin to ostracize her before they are finished with high school, apparently because her "people," while "comfortable," are "not the best" people (174). They grow up to date and marry each other and have their own families, leaving Minnie on the sidelines of the town's life.

From the little that is said about them in Flags in the Dust, it seems that the law practice that Horace Benbow inherits from his father Will serves mainly if not exclusively the aristocracy of Yoknapatawpha. He meets "conferees" "across pleasant dinner tables or upon golf links or . . . upon tennis courts"; he conserves the will's of "testators" who spend their lives "in black silk and lace caps" (179).

In Sanctuary, when Temple thinks of the college baseball game in Starkville that she is missing, she imagines, briefly, "the band, the yawning glitter of the bass horn" (37).

In Sanctuary this is the young man "at school," whom Temple notices in Dumfries when she stops there with Popeye stops in his car. The reader never sees him, but Temple says "he was almost looking right at me!" (140).

This is the girl in Sanctuary who told the Dean that Temple was "slipping out at night," in retaliation for the fact that Temple went out "with a boy she liked" (57).

In Light in August these officials and board members of Negro schools and colleges in the South regularly correspond with Joanna Burden, from whom they seek and receive business, financial, and religious advice. Joanna assumes that any of them would admit Joe Christmas to their school on her account.

These are Bayard's teachers at the University of Virginia, and Johnny's at Princeton, who in Flags in the Dust are informed about the kinds of trouble that the twins get into in New York City.