Character Keys

This is the "someone" in "The Hound" to whom one of the Negroes in jail is yelling through the window (163). It could just as easily be a woman as a man, but while the race is not specified, other Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which friends and family of black prisoners often gather outside the same window - not to mention the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, which makes it unlikely that a Negro in jail would be yelling at a white person - explain why we assume this "someone" is also black.

In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke.

In "A Rose for Emily," this crew of Negro men come from out of town to pave the town's sidewalks; the "singing" they do "in time to the rise and fall of the picks" [pick-axes] they swing is a source of entertainment to the town boys (124).

According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel.

In Intruder in the Dust the narrator calls the man who opens up the door of the barbershop at six o'clock every morning and "sweeps out the hair and cigarette stubs" a "porter" (30). The brief passage about him suggests he may also work in the pool hall nearby.

While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37).

Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends.

The prostitutes who work at the less expensive Memphis brothel to which Clarence takes Virgil and Fonzo in Sanctuary are described as "coffee-colored" (199). Their dresses are "bright," their hair is "ornate" and their smiles are "golden" (199).

Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station in The Mansion (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro.

Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the fireman who keeps the fire burning at the sawmill is described as "an older man" (243, 136). He shares his breakfast with Rider.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider is the head of "a mill gang" at the sawmill (239, 129). These other Negroes attend Mannie's funeral, and several of them try to help him in his grief. Some of them are also among the workers who shoot dice after hours at the mill.

After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). Like their teachers, these children are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246).

In "By the People" this Sergeant is serving in the Korean War when "single-handedly" he and Devries hold off an enemy attack to allow the escape of a trapped battalion (134). He is wounded during the action. This Sergeant appears again when The Mansion describes the same event, with one difference - in the novel the man's heroics occur during World War II (339).

In Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157).

In The Sound and the Fury this man seems more a product of Mrs. Bland's imagination than a real person. One of the stories she tells about her son Gerald focuses on the loyalty of "his nigger," who pleads to be allowed to accompany his "marster" to Harvard (107).

In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow.

These are the "other Negroes" mentioned by Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" - other than the "grooms" who tend to the horses and dogs - on the Harriss plantation (234). Presumably these are the servants inside the big house that Mr. Harriss built, but no other details about them are provided.

At a "bleak" train station he is passing through in The Hamlet, Labove witnesses a white man shooting this "negro" (138). Although the Negro seems to be dying, and tells the "white folks" trying to help him that "I awready been shot," when his clothes are pushed aside the bullet that hit him "rolls out . . . bloodless" (139).

Just before the young woman enters the tent at the end of "Delta Autumn," Ike McCaslin sees, "sitting in the stern" of the boat that brought her to the camp, "a Negro man" (277). The boat is his, and he is the woman's "cousin," though unlike his, her race is not immediately apparent (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for Go Down, Moses, he made the young woman the granddaughter of James Beauchamp, and so made this cousin part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family. For that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.

The "negro with a broom" in Sanctuary whom Gowan encounters when he wakes up in the Oxford train station is astonished at the young white man's disheveled appearance (35).

The river in Memphis that Mink remembers in The Mansion was lined with "chanting stevedores" loading the riverboats (315).

In The Hamlet these "strange negroes" are defined by their absence. According to the narrator, Negroes who are not already known in Frenchman's Bend stay out of the area, where the white population is known to be violent and hostile to them (5).

The first time that Linda goes into "the Negro grammar and high school" in The Mansion (246), this "alarmed messenger" is sent to tell the principal (247).

After Linda surrenders her attempt to improve Jefferson's black schools in The Mansion, she meets with "a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches" (254).

After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). The black teachers in the school (along with their students) are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). Linda's plan would "send" these same black teachers "North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are" - meanwhile replacing them in the school in Jefferson with white teachers (250).

As the narrator of Flags in the Dust says, "the Sartoris place was farmed on shares" (289). The black tenant farmers are not slaves, though Simon thinks of them as "field niggers," a label left over from slavery (241). In the narrative these share croppers are more like part of the landscape than characters, but they are mentioned several times - first when they "raise their hands" to "salute" Bayard as he drives home from the bank at the beginning of the novel (8).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses Gavin Stevens notes that "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260, 357). Although he doesn't say so explicitly, the rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Stevens is sure "they wouldn't" tell Mollie about her grandson's fate, even if they ever "hear about it" (260, 357).

The Negroes who work the land at the Harriss plantation are variously referred to in "Knight's Gambit" as "croppers" and "tenants" (163). As the owners of the land, both Mrs. Harriss' father and her husband use the tenant system, which became widespread across the South in the aftermath of Emancipation. The narrative notes that Mrs. Harriss' father managed the system in such a way that "a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared" to drive the white family's carriage - an "old battered Victoria" - whenever his daughter wanted to go to Jefferson (155). Mr.

This entry represents the two groups of Negroes who are connected with the Hoake family in The Hamlet: the "negro field hands" who work on the farm (149) and the "negro servants" who work inside the house, and with whom Alison Hoake McCarron leaves her nine-year-old boy when she goes to bring her husband's body home (150).

These people don't appear in The Reivers, but their presence is evoked when the narrator sees Reba and Minnie at the Parsham depot getting out of "the Jimcrow half" of the smoking car - "where Negroes traveled" (194).

In The Town the porter accompanies the conductor as he signals for Byron Snopes's four children to board the train. (He could be the same man as the porter on the train that brought the children to Jefferson a few days earlier, but that is not made explicit.)

In The Mansion Mink watches this Negro, who strikes him as "uppity," got off the train and put down a footstool so passengers can disembark (38).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the Jefferson undertaker who buries the black citizens of Yoknapatawpha is himself a Negro. It was typical practice throughout the Jim Crow South at the time of the story to segregate funeral parlors as well as cemeteries. The "Negro undertaker" himself does not appear in either text (265, 363).

According to Requiem for a Nun, "even Negroes" can vote in Yoknapatawpha elections "now" - though these enfranchised voters "vote for the same . . . white supremacy champions that the white" voters elected (38).

In Light in August Joe Christmas hails this man as he passes by on a quiet country road to ask "what day of the week" it is (337).

In "Raid" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this former slave is among the group allocated to Rosa Millard by the Union Lieutenant. He is identified only as a stranger to her, Bayard and Ringo. He steps forward to drive the wagon when the Lieutenant asks for someone who can handle "two span" of mules (53, 111).

The young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to the Negro who brings food to the McKellogg apartment on "a kind of wheelbarrer" as "a nigger . . . in a short kind of shirttail coat" (98).

The "Negro waiter" in The Reivers who waits on the few guests at the Parsham hotel is described as "temporary" (190, 193).

This character in Light in August is enigmatic. He is mentioned by the "old negro woman" whom Joe Brown asks to take a message to the Sheriff for him (433-34). She refuses, citing the case of this man as her reason: "I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither" (434).

All we know about referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "the man who kicked" Nancy and caused her miscarriage is that he might have been the unborn child's father (219). Because the assault happened at "a picnic or dance or frolic or fight" and Nancy would not have been allowed to attend a gathering of whites, we are assuming this man is black (219).

The wife of the cotton farmer in The Mansion works with him and the whole family picking cotton, and then, with her daughter, she prepares supper according to the etiquette of Jim Crow - that is, first she serves the meal for Mink Snopes to eat alone, and then "the meal for the family" (440).

In "Smoke" this man - referred to by Gavin Stevens only as "a nigger" - reports to Stevens that a "big car was parked in Virginius Holland’s barn the night before Judge Dukinfield was killed" (29).

In Flags in the Dust the wife of the black farmer in whose barn Bayard spends his last night in Yoknapatawpha feeds him breakfast and dinner on Christmas Day, but she herself is not named or described.

This is "the other woman" with whom Minnie's husband Ludus is having an affair in The Mansion (89).

This "Negro girl" in The Reivers is shot by Boon on Courthouse Square when he is trying to shoot Ludus (14). Her wound seems serious - not only is she "screaming" but also "bleeding like a stuck pig" - but the Sheriff decides Boon's white friends can resolve the situation by giving her father five dollars and her "a new dress . . . and a bag of candy" (14-15). When he mentions the new dress, Lucius as narrator notes that "there wasn't anything under" the dress she was wearing when she was shot (15).

In Light in August Joe Christmas and this woman lives "as man and wife" in Chicago or Detroit (225). According to the narrator, , she resembles "an ebony carving," and as Joe lies in bed with her he "tries to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes" (225-26). Since she is the only Negro woman whom the narrative mentions Joe living with, it seems likely that she is the woman Joe is remembering when he thinks about the possibility that Joanna might reject him: "No white woman ever did that.

This woman is mentioned by Byron in Light in August, who tells Hightower that there is "a nigger woman, old enough to be sensible, that dont live over two hundred yards away" from the cabin on the Burden place where he has moved Lena (314). He says she can help Lena when she goes into labor.

This is the woman in Light in August who trades "a pair of her husband's brogans" to Joe Christmas in return for his shoes (329). She is 'captured' anticlimactically when the Sheriff's dogs follow the scent of the shoes to the cabin next to a corn field where she and her family live; when the armed posse kicks open the door she drops the iron skillet she was holding.