Character Keys

Joe's biological father in Light in August is called "a fellow with the circus" who tries to ride off with Milly Hines on a dark rainy night, but is shot and killed by Milly's father (374). He and Milly are together long enough for her to get pregnant. His legacy to his son, who is given the name Joe Christmas in the Memphis orphanage, is the mystery of his own racial identity. Doc Hines is convinced he is a Negro, i.e. in the racist world of segregation, has "nigger blood" (374). Milly apparently tries to tell her parents "the man is a Mexican" (374).

The unnamed father of Caddy Compson's child is referred to in the "Appendix: Compson" (1946) only as "another man" than the man she married (332). She is "two months pregnant" with his child when she marries that husband. This 'other man' may be Dalton Ames, who is not mentioned in the "Appendix" but is Caddy's first sexual partner in The Sound and the Fury (1929). However, when in that novel Caddy's brother Quentin asks her in the context of her forthcoming marriage how many sexual partners she has had, she replies "I dont know too many" (115).

"Papa," as the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls his father, is a "lawyer" (236). Although he does not share any of the self-righteousness of the women who want to save Willy from his vices, he does participate in Mrs. Merridew's campaign to force Willy's wife to leave town, and in Job's attempt to keep Willy from flying his airplane. He calls Willy a "lunatic" (239) and blames the old man for the narrator's various forms of truancy; the narrator himself repeatedly rejects both those interpretations.

The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his father "pap" (307). He leaves his son behind when he leaves the tenant cabin he lives on at Mister Ernest's place, presumably to search for his wife, who has herself run off with a "durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake" (308). He never returns for his son.

In Sanctuary the man who fathered Popeye is a professional strike breaker who marries Popeye's mother when she gets pregnant and then, less than three weeks later, runs off - leaving her and the child with a disease that was probably syphilis.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again the the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's father "deserted him" when he was born and is "now in the state penitentiary for manslaughter" (258, 354). This "father who begot and deserted him" is described as "not only violent but bad"; Gavin Stevens, a white man, believes the "seed" this man planted in his son is the cause of his criminality, though Samuel's black grandmother blames the white landlord Roth Edmonds for her grandson's behavior (258, 354).

Neither Buddy's wife nor her parents appear directly in "The Tall Men." Mr. Gombault notes that Buddy's wife isn't buried in the McCallum family graveyard: "Buddy's wife wanted to be buried with her folks. I reckon she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

In "Ad Astra" the captured German aviator says his own aristocratic family profoundly disapproved when he told them "I haf married the daughter of a musician who was peasant" (418).

Judge Allison's father-in-law in "Beyond" was "a Republican" with whose politics the Judge agrees (789). Politically, Allison and his father-in-law are very much in the minority in Yoknapatawpha.

"The gal's paw" (424) - that is how Ratliff refers in The Mansion to the father of the wife whom the penitentiary trusty had killed. This man has "swore he would kill [the trusty] the first time he crossed the Parchman fence" (424).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not begin investigating bank robberies until the Depression, a decade after the Sartoris bank was robbed. But Faulkner is almost certainly thinking of the F.B.I. in "There Was a Queen" when he has Narcissa identify the man with whom she has sex as "a Federal agent" who came into possession of the letters she is anxious to get back while pursuing "the man who had robbed the bank" (740).

In Requiem for a Nun the jail is used as the "provost-marshal's guard-house" during the Union occupation of Jefferson during the Civil War (196); a provost marshal is in charge of a unit of military police.

Although we never learn the name of the "commissioner" mentioned in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, or much else about him, we know the man who signs the indictments against Lucas and George for moonshining is a federal official - his office is in "the federal courthouse" (216), and moonshining was a federal crime.

This man and "his marshal" are on hand when Mohataha and her people leave Yoknapatawpha for the "Indian Territory" in the "West" - presumably to make the Chickasaws' 'removal' official, though Requiem for a Nun does not specifically mention the Removal (170).

These "federal officers" would usually be called 'revenuers' (5). According to The Hamlet, as the Old Frenchman's original plantation falls into decay after the Civil War, the area that becomes known as Frenchman's Bend transforms into an enclosed back country effectively outside the reach of government authorities.

Ratliff brings this "fellow" into The Hamlet in his account of how Ab Snopes burned De Spain's barn: according to this account, he bases his description of the rapid "gait" at which De Spain rode his horse from the barn to the cabin where Ab was living on this "fellow who heard him passing in the road" (19). Throughout his account of Ab and De Spain (essentially a re-telling of the short story "Barn Burning"), Ratliff describes events he did not witness firsthand, but this is the only point at which he explains how he 'knew' what happened.

This is the "she" in The Sound and the Fury whose innocence or honor Quentin tries to protect by fighting the male classmate who is threatening to "put a frog in her desk" (68). She is probably another student, but may be the teacher - in any case, Mr. Compson, who knows his son Quentin, says "Oh. . . . She" when Quentin tells him about the fight (68).

This young lady was to marry the "young man" whom the Judge meets in Beyond when, on the morning of the wedding, he was killed in a car accident (783).

The narrator of "Monk" points out that given his rural background, Monk would have seen "the cotton and the corn in the fields, and men working it" - although that doesn't solve the mystery of Monk's last words (52).

In The Sound and the Fury Jason refers to the people whom he pays to advise him on his cotton speculations in several different ways: "some people who're right there on the ground" in New York (192), "those rich New York jews" (193), and so on. Included in this group, according to him, is "one of the biggest manipulators in New York" (192). The labels he uses say much more about his own antisemitism than they do about Wall Street analysts.

In Sanctuary these firemen arrive at Popeye's mother's boarding house in Florida to discover his grandmother in the attic, "stamping out a fire of excelsior in the center of the floor" (305). The last time they arrive there, the house is engulfed in flames.

In "Mule in the Yard" and again in The Town a fire engine full of "volunteer fire fighters" arrives too late to save Mrs. Hait's house, although the men are in time to "fling her dishes and furniture up and down the street" in the attempt (258, 252).

The "first goat owner" whom Suratt visits in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" has already sold all his goats to Flem Snopes (139).

One of the many people who gather on the Old Frenchman's place in "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" to watch Henry Armstid digging for treasure is distinguished from the group as "the first rider" (137). That is an unusual locution, but may just mean that he was riding by on a mule - or less likely, a horse - when he became the first person to stop to watch Armstid. He is chased away by Armstid, and then, presumably, spreads the word about what Armstid is doing.

In "Red Leaves" this is one of the groups of Indians who are waiting to pursue the servant.

These "folks" appear in Light in August only at second hand, when the man who tells Nathaniel Burden's family in Missouri about him mentions the trouble he got into in Mexico for killing a man who called him a horse thief. According to the messenger, "folks claim it wasn't the Mexican's horse noways," because, they say, the Mexican "never owned no horse" (244). It's not made clear whether these "folks" are Mexicans too, or as seems more likely are among the "Easterners" who have recently come west (244).

In Intruder in the Dust Chick gets to play in a varsity football game in Mottstown when this "regular player" cannot (121). He may not be able to play due to injury, or academic ineligibility, or an over-protective mother - the narrator offers all three possibilities.

The narrator of Intruder in the Dust calls the Jefferson high school football team that travels to Mottstown "the regular team" (121), which presumably means the varsity. After their victory, three of them return to Jefferson in the car that Chick's mother hired.

In The Mansion three foreign correspondents for the newspapers are among Linda and Barton's wedding guests; they are the last to leave the party.

After Houston returns to Yoknapatawpha in The Hamlet, he sometimes meets the "contemporaries" who remember him from the "youth" they shared, with whom he still occasionally gets together for "drinks or cards" (237).

This woman in The Mansion used to work in a "Catalpa Street house" (305), an address that means she was a prostitute in one of the many brothels in Memphis. According to Albert, "she looks a little like a whore yet," but after her husband died in World War II, she became a member of Goodyhay's eccentric congregation (305).

In Light in August these "boys in identical overalls, who live within a three mile radius" of the McEachern farm," are "fourteen and fifteen" years old when, with Joe, they arrange to have sex with a Negro girl in a deserted sawmill shed (156). When Joe's "turn" comes, however, and he begins to beat her instead, the "other four" fight him to make him stop (157). Joe is presumably with the same "four or five" boys later in the novel when one of them describes menstruation (184).

This is the group of "four or five other boys of [Quentin's] size and age" in Absalom! who go out to the decaying Sutpen mansion "daring one another to evoke the ghost, since it would have to be haunted" (172). The group includes Luster; the other boys are not described, but all run away when confronted by Clytemnestra among the "rotting piles" of the old slave quarters (173).

In "Red Leaves" this "lad of fourteen" is "undersized," "mute," and apparently a curiosity to the Indians (328). He is tasked with guarding the slaves' drums, which are hidden in the swamp outside of the plantation.

In Requiem for a Nun the people who were formerly enslaved in Jackson and elsewhere are referred to, tangentially, in the negative characterization of the Federal officials who administered the post-war attempt at Reconstruction: they are the "freed slaves" whose votes those "carpet-baggers" know how to manipulate (87). Presumably this group also includes the students who attend Jackson's three "College[s] for Negroes"; the colleges are mentioned in the text but not the people who attend them (87).

This soldier with a "raised moustached face" in "All the Dead Pilots" (524) is "drinking from a bottle in a doorway" of the estaminet when Sartoris arrives there in search of Spoomer (522). Sartoris has to fight him in order to leave the place.

In the bistro in "Ad Astra," a French officer, "tall, with a gaunt, tragic face," implies that Monaghan and the military policeman should remove the German prisoner from the premises (422). The officer has a glass eye, probably as a result of the war; it is described as "motionless, rigid in a face that looked even deader than the spurious eye" (422).

In "Ad Astra" this sergeant accompanies the French officer when he confronts the aviators about bringing the German prisoner into the cafe.

In "All the Dead Pilots," these are the French soldiers in the Amiens estaminet who witness Sartoris' frustration about Spoomer's affair with Antoinette. Knowing no French, he imagines they are "Laughing at me about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there" in a bedroom with her, but being unable to do anything about it because of Spoomer's superior rank (519-20).

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Frenchman" alternated with "the Spaniard" for possession and control of the area (81). Historically, this land was claimed and ruled over by France several different times during the 18th century.

One of the boys in town who, "on a dare," joins the unnamed narrator of "A Bear Hunt" when he was fifteen to spend a night on the Indian mound (66). During and afterwards, they do not speak about their experience, apparently awed by it; the narrator says even though they were children, "yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were - or should have been - beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear" (66).

For several years before "Hand upon the Waters" begins, Boyd Ballenbaugh has been hiding at his brother’s place in Yoknapatawpha, though he is hiding "not from the police but from some of his Memphis friends or later business associates" (76). Both the mention of the police and the fact that Boyd is in hiding seems to suggest that, like many of the characters whom Faulkner's fictions locate in Memphis, these men in "Hand upon the Waters" are members of the underworld, and their "business" some kind of criminal activity - but that is not made explicit.

In The Town after Linda Snopes stops seeing Matt Levitt, she goes to the movies "with another girl or maybe two or three of them" (205).

These are the friends of the unnamed narrator of "A Bear Hunt" who associate the Indian mound with "secret and violent blood" and a "savage and sudden destruction" (65). As descendants of "literate, town-bred people," their feelings about the "profoundly and darkly enigmatic mound" stem from their romantic ideas about Indians gotten from the "secret dime novels which we passed among ourselves" (65). One of the boys joins the narrator for a night atop the mound.

Roth Edmonds meets with these unnamed friends after church in "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses; their farm is eight miles from the Edmonds plantation.

As part of his description in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, Ike McCaslin imagines "women crouched with huddled children behind locked doors," seeking shelter from threats that are not named in the text, but are clearly meant to be understood as a consequence of the defeat of the (white) South and the emancipation of the (black) South (277).

Like her husband, this woman is "not old" (494). In Light in August, she listens and asks questions as her husband tells the story of meeting Lena and Byron on the road to Tennessee. Also like her husband, she seems to enjoy their intimacy and the comedy of Byron's attempted intimacies with Lena.

During his years in New Orleans in "Red Leaves," Doom is introduced by "his patron," De Vitry, into the company of the "gamblers and cutthroats of the river front" (317).

Only one member of Clarence Snopes' gang is mentioned separately in either "By the People" or The Mansion: his "lieutenant," the "second-in-command in the old gang" (89, 330). He is not described in more detail, but when he "tries to take advantage of their old relationship" after Snopes becomes a constable, Snopes' treatment of him is described as "ruthless and savage" (130, 330).