Character Keys

This "old gentleman" gave the toy soldiers to the boy that the Judge meets in Beyond (793). He himself does not appear, but the boy's mother describes him as having "lived here a long time, they say," and being "quite wealthy," "with a white mustache and that kind of popping eyes that old people have who eat too much" (793). He often sits with the woman and her child, "talking and breathing hard" (793).

In "Red Leaves" the group that pursues the runaway servant does not include the tribe's old men - or its women and children.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin sees this "old man eating something out of a paper bag" (112) when he gets off the interurban car in the town near Cambridge. When he passes the same spot later he notes that the man is gone.

In both "The Unvanquished" and the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, this group of "old men" once captured Grumby, but released him after he showed them what he claimed was a commission from General Forrest (150, 93).

In both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished these unnamed people, from various places and social ranks in the county, make up the white portion of the 'congregation' that assembles in the Episcopal Church to hear Rosa confess her sins - her campaign of stealing from the Yankees - and to enjoy the fruits of those sins, the mules and money she disperses into the community.

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111), the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses, as a reference point for the age of his father's Grandfather.

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "old woman working in a field" works on through the shelling of the French countryside by the Germans, "stooping stubbornly among the green rows" as Sartoris passes her twice going to and from Amiens (521).

In Sanctuary, when Temple and her father sit down "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris, this "old woman" comes to them "with decrepit promptitude" to collect the money - four sous - for the seats (316).

In The Hamlet Ratliff shares a bed with his oldest nephew while Mink Snopes' family stays at his house in Jefferson. Ratliff "had given up his room to them" (288).

Passing through Jefferson from preflight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators" (251). "Operators" here seems to mean 'managers.'

Musicians play at the Grotto club at two different points in Sanctuary. A second "orchestra," "from a downtown hotel," is hired to provide music at Red's funeral. A dispute arises about what kind of music they should play. "The leader" proposes "the Blue Danube" by "Strauss" (a detail which suggests these musicians are white, 244), another man proposes "jazz." But at the suggestion of the proprietor of the Grotto they first play "Nearer My God, To Thee," and then the "cornetist" plays a solo version of "In That Haven of Rest" (245).

In "Knight's Gambit" Rafe McCallum acquires the horse that Max Harriss buys from "some owner" who may have "ruined" it by trying "to break its spirit by fear or violence"; it is rumored that McCallum bought the horse "because its owner wanted to destroy it" (210-11).

The women who work at the Memphis orphanage where Christmas lives in Light in August include the ones who find him "on that doorstep that Christmas night" and so decide to give him the last name of "Christmas" (383-84). Five years later two young women clean and dress Joe Christmas before he leaves the orphanage with Simon McEachern.

These "other children" in "Beyond" are the ones who gave the young mother's son the scars he bears "one day when they were playing" (794). It isn't clear if this happened in a previous life, or in Beyond, but what the mother says - "they didn't know they were going to hurt him" (794) - adds to the details in the story that suggest a connection between this anonymous mother and son and Mary and Jesus in the New Testament.

The "overseer" Sutpen hires in Absalom! is credited with helping the plantation "run smoothly" (57). He is identified only as the son of the county sheriff.

As the young Thomas Sutpen moves east across Virginia in Absalom!, he notes these "white men" on "fine horses" (182), the "white men who superintend the work" of the field slaves (184).

In The Sound and the Fury, the man who saves Jason from the furious old man who attacks him is the owner the traveling show that just played in Jefferson. He tells Jason that he "runs a respectable show, with a respectable troupe," and has already fired the man Jason is looking for (312).

The three "town boys" who appear as individuals in Chapter 4 of Sanctuary have separate entries. This entry refers to the aggregate group of young men mentioned in the novel who do not go to the University but do have access to cars which make them desirable dates for Temple on "week nights," between the dances and other weekend social activities on the campus (29). Excluded at those times, these "boys" can only watch Temple from a distance that is socio-economic as well as physical.

As a symptom of the post-war building- and baby-boom, these house painters can barely finish up their job before eager veterans move into Eula Acres in The Mansion.

The specific chain gang that Mink works on while at Parchman's in The Mansion consists of eleven men altogether, who go to and from the "mess hall to eat" and the cotton field where they are forced to work "shackled to the same chain" (105). The three who are named - Mink himself, Stillwell and Barron - are all white, and they live inside the penitentiary in "a detached wire-and-canvas-and-plank hut," so it seems safe to assume that in the segregrated South, all eleven are white, but that is an assumption. The gang tries to kill Mink after he objects to their plan to escape.

"Turnkey" is a colloquial term for jailor; this "turnkey" is the official at Parchman in The Mansion who opens the gate for Mink's release (423).

"They were picking the cotton now" (100) - after Mink has been released from the penitentiary, this is how in The Mansion he thinks about the inmates who remain in Parchman's, most of whom work as field hands on the farm around the prison.

This is the "trusty" who leads Mink out of the state penitentiary in The Mansion; he is in Parchman as a "lifer" who "killed his wife with a ball peen hammer" but according to the Warden "was converted and received salvation in jail" (423) - which explains why he would have been made a trusty, that is, a prisoner entrusted by the authorities with various kinds of responsibilities.

During Mink's long confinement at Parchman in The Mansion there is a turnover of wardens. It is not clear when the old warden leaves and this new one arrives. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, this second warden is remarkably kind and sympathetic towards Mink.

Light in August never gives Reverend Hightower's mother a first name, much less a maiden one. But it does tell us that "she was one of many children of a genteel couple who had never got ahead and who seemed to find in the church some substitute for that which lacked upon the dinnertable" (472).

This couple appears in "Pantaloon in Black" as a story and again as a chapter in Go Down, Moses only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt.

The musicians that Temple and her father listen to in the Luxembourg Gardens in Sanctuary are dressed "in the horizon blue of the army" - suggesting they may be a military band, but that is not stated - and play Massenet, Scriabin and Berlioz (316).

The final scene of Sanctuary "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to children "shouting" and "sailing toy boats" (316).

Santuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "women [who] sit knitting in shawls" (316).

In the play's first scene in Requiem for a Nun, "a section of the court" is represented on stage, and the stage directions list "the judge, officers, the opposing lawyers, the jury" (39). The "judge" and one of the officers - the bailiff - speak in the scene, and so have their own Character entries. This entry represents the other men referred to, though it's unlikely that any production of the play would cast actors to represent the "opposing lawyers" or "the jury" on stage.

Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.

In The Mansion Gavin Stevens knows the lawyer in Pascagoula who sets Linda up with an apartment.

In Light in August, when Hightower walks home after learning that the Sheriff is closing in on Christmas, he is so shaken that when "someone speaks to him in passing," he "does not even know" that he has been addressed (310). There's no indication of the gender of this passerby, but it's unlikely that a black would speak first in passing a white man, so we identify 'him' as white.

In "That Evening Sun" these people witness Nancy's confrontation with Stovall and "tell about" it; the "ones that passed the jail" later that night hear Nancy singing and yelling and the jailer trying to make her stop (291).

In Absalom!, "whenever anyone white or black stops in the road" to speak to Charles E. S-V. Bon (162), Clytemnestra "drives the passerby on" with a "murmur of vituperation" (162).

In Flags in the Dust the other people in the waiting room where Dr. Alford, Jenny and Old Bayard wait to see the Memphis specialist are described as "quiet" (246).

In The Unvanquished Bayard describes "the Patroller (sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off)" having caught some of the Satoris slaves away from the plantation (16). In the antebellum South patrollers watched at night to capture any slaves who were out of their quarters without authorization from their owners, and pursued fugitive slaves.

These are the various dancers and gamblers "at the crap table" (237) who are at the Grotto club the night Popeye takes Temple there in Sanctuary. The dancers are summed up in the phrase about the "movement of feet, the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the blood" (233).

This man may exist, or be a figment of Minnie Cooper's imagination, or even an invention of the customer in the barber shop who refers to him, obliquely, as the "man scare" that Minnie reportedly had "about a year" before "Dry September" begins; the customer describes him as "a man on the kitchen roof" who was looking at Minnie "undress" (171). We have labeled him 'white' because from the larger story it seems clear that if the reported voyeur had been identified as 'black,' the white men of the town would have had to punish someone.

These are the people in Light in August who, Lena says, "have been right kind" to her during her travels on foot from Alabama to Yoknapatawpha. The narrative implies a difference between the way men and women judge Lena when it describes Mrs. Beard looking at her "once, completely, as strange women had been doing for four weeks now" (85). Nonetheless the narrative does confirm Lena's assertion that everyone is "kind." When she inquires for Lucas Burch, people send her along to the next town, often finding her a ride in the process.

One story that is told in Light in August about the first Gail Hightower concerns the time he invaded an "al fresco church revival" and "turned it into a week of amateur horse racing" while a "dwindling congregation" listened to the "gaunt, fanaticfaced country preachers" (472) condemn him.

When Jason remembers his father's funeral in The Sound and the Fury, he mentions the people who "were holding umbrellas" (201) and who filled in the grave, "throwing dirt into it" (202). Presumably some of these people are from the community, and presumably some are paid cemetery workers, but "they" are not described in any detail.

Although Ellen and her aunt "write out a hundred invitations" to the Coldfield-Sutpen wedding in Absalom!, when it happens "there were just ten people in the church, including the wedding party" (39). Two of the witnesses are General and Mrs. Compson. The text does not say who the others were, and why they chose to defy public opinion by being there.

In Intruder in the Dust the crowd of spectators at the football game in the Mottstown high school stadium is divided between the people who "sit in the grandstand" and "the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play" (122).

This is the crowd at the "bleak" railroad station in The Hamlet where Labove sees a white man shoot a black man; it "scatters" as the shooting occurs, then forms a "crowd" around the Negro so dense that Labove has to "use his football tactics" to move through it. Some of them also "overpower and disarm" the white man (138).

These are the people - referred to simply as "they" - in the seven different places where Secretary lands the plane as he tries to fly from Memphis to Renfro (243). At each of these places, "they tell him how to get to Renfro" (243); the implication is that it is Secretary's fault that he cannot follow their directions.

This entry represents the people in The Reivers who are in a "carriage or wagon" when the automobile being driven by Boon moves through the Square (39). Some of these horse- and mule-drawn vehicles have "women and children" in them, and some are being driven by women (39). Grandfather Priest's behavior changes, depending on the gender of the driver, but in either case, both the animals and the people are often startled by the presence of the car.

In The Reivers Lucius describes the men who crowd around the race track and bet on the races as "the same overalls, tieless, the sweated hats, the chewing tobacco" that he associated with the men in the hotel dining room that morning (227). But a major difference is that this crowd is racially unsegregated: "people, black and white" (228). One member of this crowd leads Lightning to the starting line after Ned is disqualified. "People" could imply women, of course, but until Minnie arrives at the end of the third race, there is no evidence of them at the track.

The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis in Go Down, Moses are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221).