Character Keys

Herbert Head mentions "a little widow over in town" when he is trying to ingratiate himself with Caddy's brother Quentin (110). The "town" is presumably Boston, "over" the river from Harvard. Although it has been suggested that Head is talking about a prostitute, the idea of 'the college widow' as an unmarried woman who dates a succession of students over the years was proverbial in both 1910 (when the conversation takes place) and 1929 (when The Sound and the Fury was published).

The "two or three companions of [Ikkemotubbe's] bachelor youth" who meet him at the "river" upon his return from New Orleans are briefly mentioned by in "The Old People" (202) and again (as "three or four companions") in Go Down, Moses (157-58).

In "Retreat," the Confederate officer in command of the unit that is camped on the outskirts of Jefferson talks with Buck McCaslin about Colonel Sartoris. He recurs in "The Unvanquished," when Bayard remembers this earlier scene, and then repeats these two appearances in The Unvanquished.

In Light in August this is the troop of Confederate cavalry under the command of General Van Dorn to which Hightower's grandfather belonged. During the Civil War it rode into Jefferson and destroyed a Union supply depot, after which most of them rode away. (This event that Hightower is obsessed with is adapted by Faulkner from an actual raid that occurred in 1862 in Holly Springs, a Mississippi town near Oxford.)

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this cavalry unit of indeterminate size stops to talk with Granny and her party on "the third night" of their journey toward Memphis (23, 56).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this is the officer in command of the Confederate cavalrymen who warns Granny that she should turn back because "the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols" (24, 56). He apologizes for saying "hell" in her presence, and is chivalrous enough to offer her "an escort" when she insists on going on (24, 56).

In Light in August these military physicians tend soldiers wounded in battle during the Civil War. They are often assisted by Reverend Hightower's father, who learns from them to practice medicine.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, McCaslin refers to the men who led the Confederacy in the Civil War as the "group of men . . . inside" the U.S. who "tried to tear the country in two with a war" (269, 322). He calls these men "better men" than "Hitler" and "Pelley" (in the story, 269) or "Hitler," "Roosevelt or Wilkie" (in the novel, 322), but seems glad that "they failed" (269, 322).

In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).

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.

In Absalom! this "orderly" tells Henry that "the colonel wants you in his tent" (279). A military 'orderly' is a kind of personal servant to an officer, but the way this one addresses Henry - "Sutpen" (279) - makes it clear that he is white.

Ab Snopes' Civil War wound was never received in battle, or even from a Yankee, but Faulkner provides several different accounts of the Confederate who shot him while he was stealing a horse and left him with a lifelong limp. In "Barn Burning" that man is identified as "a Confederate provost's man" (5). We are assuming this is the same person who shoots him in two other texts, which provide slightly different versions of Ab's wounding.

During the Civil War both North and South used provost marshals as a kind of military police force behind the lines. The "Confederate provost marshals' men" from whom Goodhue Coldfield is hiding in Absalom! would have arrested him as a draft dodger or compelled him to serve in the military (6).

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.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. In Absalom! they appear in several different ways. First, as the idealized "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120).

In addition to the specific Confederate units who appear in the various stories that make up the novel Go Down, Moses is the abstract representation of these men whom Ike McCaslin imagines he sees when he looks at Lucas Beauchamp (who descends from slaves): "the face of a generation," "the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold" (104).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. Four different units appear in the short story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." This entry represents the "two soldiers in one of General Forrest's forage wagons" who bring Lucius back to Sartoris (690). As foragers, these men were charged with finding food for the troops in the surrounding countryside - a common practice in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).

In a passage added to "Raid" as a chapter of The Unvanquished, Drusilla tells Ringo about the race between two railroad trains, one driven by Confederates and the other by Union forces, who rushed past Hawkhurst before the track was destroyed by Yankee troops.

According to the narrator of Light in August, at the end of the Civil War most of the men who fought for the Confederacy "returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead" (474).

In Requiem for a Nun, the ceremony at the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900 includes the firing of a salute and a somewhat diminished version of the famed 'rebel yell' performed by the town's surviving veterans of the Civil War, "old men in the gray and braided coats" of officers - since they have apparently promoted themselves over the passing years (188).

The congregants in Goodyhay's church in The Mansion are mostly ex-soldiers and their wives or mistresses; one of the men wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been removed" (305), and another refers to the group as "ex-drafted sons of bitches" (300). But the group also includes "the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed" (295) as well as the men who help to build at the two church sites.

Both times Ruby tells how the lawyer she hired got Lee out of prison in Sanctuary, she says he "got a congressman" (59, 278). Neither time does she go into any more details about the congressman.

In "Knight's Gambit" there are two different but essentially interchangeable groups of workers who turn the old plantation that Harriss inherits into a conspicuously modern and lavish show place. The text even uses the same word to describe both groups: gangs. First on the scene are the "gangs of strange men with enough machinery to have built a high-way or a reservoir" who build the stables, paddock, and polo field (161).

Work "gangs" in Faulkner's fiction are often black, but the one described in The Reivers as "laying a sewer line" in Memphis is presumably white, since Mr. Binford is found working as part of it on one of his self-imposed absences from Miss Reba (112).

In The Reivers Nat warns Otis about his behavior by mentioning "a boy like you back there in Jefferson" who is now in "the state penitentiary at Parchman" (139-40). It's not clear whether he is thinking of an actual person, or inventing one to threaten Otis.

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "shelling corn" while listening to the old man tell tales of yore (323).

In "Hand upon the Waters," the coroner who contacts Stevens about Lonnie Grinnup’s death and presides over the inquest is described as "an old country doctor" (70). He signs the death certificate without ever suspecting the death might not have been an accident.

In Intruder in the Dust the coroner who is going to perform the autopsy on Jake Montgomery's body is waiting at "the undertaker's back door" when it arrives there (177).

The first small mob that spills into the Square on Sunday morning in Intruder in the Dust includes several of the young men whom Chick saw and heard in the barbershop earlier that day, including this "oiler from the cotton gin" (42).

"The counterman" at Jefferson's all-night cafe is mentioned only briefly in Intruder in the Dust, and neither named nor described (207). Because Faulkner makes no mention of his race, we assume he is white.

In Flags in the Dust, these are the two "infant children" - sex not specified - in the "family of country people" that moves into Jefferson during the First World War (72). Since their mother is pregnant again, "infant" presumably means something like "less than three years old."

Sanctuary describes the various farmers and their wives who come into Jefferson on the weekend. Horace, for example, watches while three of these women get down from a wagon and "don various finery" on the street in front of his house. 'Country people' in this novel can be black or white: "the women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments," and the men "in slow overalls and khaki" who move in crowds through the town square and stand in throngs "listening" to the music playing on radios and phonographs in record and drug stores (111, 112).

In "Uncle Willy" two different groups of people patronize Willy's drugstore. They are sharply distinguished by race - and by the kinds of things they buy. This group is the "country people buying patent medicines" (226); they are white.

Among the several kinds of crowds described in Intruder in the Dust are the ones composed of 'country people.' That is, people "from the distant circumambient settlements and crossroads stores and isolate farms," who regularly come in to Jefferson to shop and do other kinds of business. The last chapter opens with Chick watching them from the window of his uncle's office: "people black and white" (231), "men and women and children too then and the old people and the babies and the young couples" (230).

In Flags in the Dust this "young man" moves from the country into Jefferson during World War I; he is identified as "steady" and "exemplary," poor but with "a desire to get on" (72). He he is drafted and sent overseas as "a company cook in the S.O.S." - that is, the Supply Service (72). In his absence the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow take care of his wife and children.

These "countrymen" - inhabitants of the countryside around Jefferson rather than town residents - don't appear directly in The Unvanquished, but they have left mark on the "wooden steps scuffed by the heavy bewildered boots" when they come into town to consult Ben Redmond in his law office (248); the fact that they are "bewildered" suggests their class status, and seems also intended to say something about Redmond's practice.

In Flags in the Dust this unnamed woman is pregnant again when she moves from the countryside into Jefferson with her husband and two children. When her husband is drafted and shipped overseas, she is helped by the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow.

In The Town, Gavin refers to the women - groups of "four or five or six ladies in sunbonnets" who live on "back-country roads" (240) - as the customers to whom Ratliff sells sewing machines, and from whom he has learned how to listen. Gavin's use of "ladies" is generous; these are the wives of the poor farmers who inhabit Yoknapatawpha's "back-country" in the fictions.

There are several references in "The Tall Men" to "county agents" in general. This is "the county agent's young fellow" who visits the McCallums periodically to explain the new federal programs that regulate agricultural production (57). He works for the federal government as part of the Roosevelt administration's efforts during the Depression to improve farm practices in places like the deep South. To the McCallums, this is the "the Government" that wants to "interfere with how a man farmed his own land" (55).

In "Smoke," this county functionary investigates Anselm Holland’s despoliation of the Mardis Cemetery.

In "the justice's court" in Absalom!, General Compson sees Charles E. S-V. Bon "handcuffed to an officer" (163); this officer may be "the sheriff" (164), or one of his deputies.

In The Mansion Luther Biglin's mother is the sister of a "rural political boss whose iron hand ruled one of the county divisions" (448). The division is not Frenchman's Bend, because this man's rule is compared to Will Varner's "at Frenchman's Bend," but we cannot say what other part of the county it is (448). This boss helped elect Sheriff Bishop, and so Bishop gives his wife's son (Luther) the job of county jailer.

In both "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun this courier rides to Natchez to inform authorities of the capture of the bandits and to negotiate for the presumed reward for their capture.

In Sanctuary the clerk is mentioned calling Temple's name and when the judge upholds Horace's only objection during her testimony.

In The Town this court clerk reads the indictment at Mink's trial and asks him how he pleads - "'guilty or not guilty?'" (86).

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving, neither the chief of the tribe (The Man) nor his son are named. In the patriarchal society Faulkner imagines, this son is heir to the title The Man - and as the son of The Man's sister, his cousin Doom is out of the line of succession. In "Red Leaves" both The Man and his son die mysteriously after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans. In "A Justice" Doom's responsibility for their deaths is made explicit.

In The Hamlet this distant kinsman's wife's cousin puts Ratliff up for the night and buys a sewing machine from him.

In Sanctuary the Grotto employee in charge of the "crap table" (as the narrative calls it, though it is usually referred to as a craps table) is called "the dealer" when he speaks his one line in the novel: "'Eleven,' he said" (240).