Character Keys

The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" remains unnamed. (When Faulkner develops the episode in The Town, Chick Mallison retells the story as he heard it from his cousin Gowan.) This narrator, like that of "A Rose for Emily," refers to himself in the first-person plural, "we believed," "our ears," etc. (149, 150), and serves as a kind of communal voice for "our town" (149); but he also occupies a privileged narrative position as one of four people who know what the water tower means to Flem Snopes, "that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all" (149).

Although the boy who narrates the story of "Uncle Willy" says very little about himself, he is a recognizable version of other juvenile narrators in Faulkner's fiction, and a way for Faulkner to provide a perspective on both the story's unconventional protagonist and the conventional small-town world of Jefferson. He likes playing baseball with his friends and eating the ice cream that Job makes at Willy's drugstore, is uncomfortable in school, and is willing "to do anything [Willy] asked me to do" (239).

"Negress" is not a term the narrator of Flags in the Dust uses for any other female Negro, so it's not clear why he uses it the one time he mentions the black maid at the Beard boarding house. She is helping Mrs. Beard serve breakfast at the boarding house. She is also described as "slatternly" (324).

In The Town the Jefferson hotel porter named Samson works with someone whom Ratliff refers to as "Samson's least boy," whose one action in the novel is carrying a newspaper for the white bondsman when he leaves the hotel (103). It's not clear what "least boy" means - perhaps he is a bellboy at the hotel or possibly he is Samson's youngest son.

The Negro who gives Christmas a ride into Mottstown in Light in August tells him that he is going there to pick up "a yellin calf" that "pappy bought" (339). "Yellin" almost certainly means 'yearling,' and "pappy" presumably means 'father.'

While "running" away from the Choctaw plantation in "Red Leaves," the servant encounters this "motionless" man, "another Negro" (331). They exchange glances.

In "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, "one Negro in the county" was murdered and burned in his cabin by Grumby's Independents (93, 149).

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this soldier, "a hulking giant of an Arkansas Negro cotton-field hand" in civilian life (134, 339), heroically rescues Devries and a sergeant by carrying them both away from enemy fire. Devries (unofficially) recognizes his heroism by pinning one of his own medals on the man. We can hear affection and admiration in Devries' voice when he addresses the man who saved him as "you big bastard"; the narrator's tone when he persists in calling this soldier a "field hand" is harder to interpret (134, 340).

Trying to buy ammunition to kill Houston in The Mansion, Mink claims that this unnamed black man saw a bear's footprint at Blackwater Slough.

One of the three black men in Flags in the Dust (the others are Richard, and an unnamed "half-grown negro boy") who live with the MacCallums, presumably as servants or tenant farmers, or he may be the "negro who assists" Henry make moonshine whiskey (335).

In The Sound and the Fury Jason questions this man he encounters at "the forks" where two roads diverge about which way the Ford carrying Quentin and the man in the red tie went (238).

In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," this woman lives in Vicksburg with her family, and was willing to take in her niece after her father's death. When this niece tells Ike McCaslin that her aunt "took in washing," he suddenly realizes the racial nature of the "effluvium" her niece brings with her (278, 277). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, the women who wash clothes are always Negroes.

Neither the Negro man whom Boon shoots in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses nor the cause of the quarrel between the men is explained. In "Lion" Quentin describes the man in terms that, like the entire episode, will make a 21st century sensibility wince: "They said he was a bad nigger, but I don't know" (189). When the scene was revised for the novel, the third-person narrator calls him a "negro" instead (223). In both texts this man is armed with "a dollar-and-a-half mail order pistol" that misfires (189, 223).

In Light in August this bootblack works in the Mottstown barber shop where Christmas gets a shave. The barbershop is identified as "a white barbership," but in that context the adjective refers to the patrons it serves (349). The race of the bootblack is not specified, but since the job he performs, shining shoes, is typically done in Faulkner's fiction by blacks, we have identified his race as "Black." This bootblack notices that Joe is wearing "second hand brogans that are too big for him" (349).

In Flags in the Dust "one of the grandsons" of the patriarchal Negro who owns the molasses mill feeds the cane into it and "roll[s] his eyes covertly" at Bayard and Narcissa as they watch the process (288).

In Light in August Christmas runs into this boy when he first arrives in the county. "Swinging a tin bucket," "barefoot," and wearing "faded, patched, scant overalls" (227, 228), he answers Christmas' questions by telling him "where Miz Burden stay at" and that "colored folks around here looks after her" (227). As he walks away, he sings a risque song.

In Absalom! this is the "negro boy" who is playing with Bon's son "outside the gates" at Sutpen's when Clytemnestra drives him away (158).

In The Mansion this "Negro boy on [a] bicycle" is the first person Mink sees when he finally reaches Jefferson (451). He gives Mink directions to Flem Snopes' place.

In Absalom! Rosa Coldfield orders "casual negro boys who happened to pass the house" to "rake her yard" (171-72); they understand that they will be paid later by Judge Benbow.

In Flags in the Dust the black man in whose barn Bayard spends Christmas eve tells him that his "brudder-in-law" borrowed his mules, and so Bayard will have to wait for a ride to the next town (365). When the mules "miraculously" appear later on Christmas day, the narrator refers to the "yet uncorporeal brother-in-law" (366) - seeming to imply that the Negro invented him.

In "Knight's Gambit" the "Negro butler" at the Harriss plantation opens the door to Gavin Stevens and Charles Mallison and "immediately vanishes" (249).

This is the man who drives Mrs. Compson out to the Sartoris place in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished.

In The Town this man works for the Sartoris family and drives a horse-drawn carriage rather than a car. He is holding the reins when Mr. Buffaloe drives his homemade automobile "into the square at the moment when Colonel Sartoris the banker's surrey and blooded matched team were crossing it on the way home" (12).

The Negro chauffeur in Flags in the Dust who offers to fetch Miss Jenny's driver Simon from the kitchen at the Mitchell house is "clad in army o.d. and a pair of linoleum putties" (30). ("O.d." is a military way of saying 'olive drab.')

The Harriss' chauffeur in "Knight's Gambit" is described as "a strange Negro in a uniform who did nothing but drive and wash and polish" the automobile (158). "Strange" in this context means 'not native to Yoknapatawpha.'

As Ratliff puts it in The Mansion, the "Negro" whom Manfred de Spain hires to drive him as President of the bank wears a "white coat and a showfer's cap" (174).

The black man who works for Colonel Linscomb as both "chauffeur" (269) and "houseman" (277) in The Reivers is also McWillie's father.

The middle child in the family of black sharecroppers in Flags in the Dust who let Young Bayard sleep in their barn and share their Christmas dinner; of the gender of this child the narrative says only, and strangely, "The second one might have been either or anything" (364).

The posse chasing Christmas in Light in August finds this child, "stark naked" and "sitting in the cold ashes on the hearth" beside his mother, when they kick open the door to her cabin (329). There is no indication of the child's gender.

"Red Leaves" refers to the children of the slaves as "pickaninnies" twice: first when the servant sees them in the quarters, "naked in the dust" (328), and at the end, when he imagines the quarters and "the pickaninnies like ebony toys in the dust" (340).

The Negro children in Yoknapatawpha remain out of sight in Intruder in the Dust along with their parents, but Chick pictures them where they "should have been" on a Monday morning in the county: "in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and wornout automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans" (143).

The procession at the Negro church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury consists of "six small children: four girls with tight pigtails bound with small scraps of cloth like butterflies, and two boys with close napped heads" (292). At the start of the service on Easter Sunday, the children "entered and marched up the aisle, strung together in a harness of white ribbons and flowers" (292). Later they sing with the choir "in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers" (293).

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who call at the Sartoris plantation seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.

According to Ned in The Reivers, the "hollow" where they "stable" Lightning before and between races is on land "that belongs to one of Possum's [Parsham's] church members" (217).

In Light in August Joanna Burden leaves Jefferson several times a year, for "three and four days," during which she visits the various "negro schools and colleges through the south" that she supports (233). There she meets with "the teachers and the students" (234).

In The Sound and the Fury Dilsey, Frony, Luster, and Benjy walk to church past fellow churchgoers: "They emerged from the cabins and struggled up the shaling levee to the road - men in staid, hard brown or black, with gold watch chains and now and then a stick; young men in cheap violent blues or stripes and swaggering hats; women a little stiffly sibilant, and children in garments bought second hand of white people" (291).

This is the older of the two Negroes who work in Rogers' restaurant in Flags in the Dust. The narrative does not explicitly call him the cook, but since it describes the cooking that is going on and identifies the "younger of the two," Houston, as the waiter, it seems safe to assume this older Negro is the cook.

In The Town this cook lives and works in Manfred de Spain's "late father's big wooden house" (14).

In The Mansion one of the two black servants who work for Flem in his mansion is referred to as the "Negro cook" (172). She is referred to by several characters and the narrator, and she passes close to Mink in the dark as she leaves the mansion to go home, but she is never described.

The first of the two Negroes who cook for Hightower in Light in August is a woman who is described as a "high brown" (72). She quits after Mrs. Hightower's suicide, when her presence as a woman in his house makes her and Reverend Hightower vulnerable to gossip and vigilante violence (72).

In "Monk" Warden Gambrell has an unnamed Negro cook who works in his house as a trusty; when the warden's pistol goes missing, he has the cook "severely beaten" on the assumption that he stole it (53). Historically, there were female prisoners at Parchman's, but in this story it seems more likely Faulkner is thinking of the cook as male.

Both The Hamlet and The Town mention the woman who cooks for the Varners. In the first novel, is mentioned as a sign of Will Varner's relative wealth. The narrator calls her the "only" servant of any sort in the whole district" (11) - though later the novel mentions two other Negro servants, a man and a woman, who work for Houston after his marriage. The Town describes the early hour at which she is forced to rise to cook Varner's breakfast for him (313).

The black woman who cooks Roth's food does not appear directly in Go Down, Moses, but he does speak to her "through the kitchen door" when he wants her to bring Lucas into the house (125).

In The Mansion this cotton farmer allows Mink to work and stay the night at his place. As a Negro he expresses himself carefully when talking with the white Mink, but he clearly has doubts about the story Mink has told him about himself.

This group consists of the "girls" and "young men" - "probably the neighbors swapping the work" - who are helping to pick the unnamed Negro farmer's cotton in The Mansion (438).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, six or seven men who work with Rider - three from his timber gang and three or four from the mill crew - are shooting craps with the white night watchman's crooked dice in the tool-room at the back of the mill’s boiler shed.

In The Mansion the "young Negro man" whom Mink sees inside the small store in Lake Cormorant is wearing the "remnants of an army uniform" (286). He obeys the store proprietor's command to drive Mink down the road, but at the same time subtly tries to let Mink know that the white man had cheated him.

In The Mansion Mink sees "a few Negroes" shopping - "trafficking" is the word the narrative uses - in "the small dingy store" in Memphis where he buys animal crackers (319).

In "A Rose for Emily," this "Negro delivery boy" brings Emily the package of arsenic she purchased from the druggist (126).