Character Keys

When the Hineses are waiting for the northbound train from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August, they are joined by "drummers and loafers and such" who buy tickets for the southbound train (359). 'Drummer' was a well-known term for traveling salesman at the time the novel was published.

When they cross the Tallahatchie River in The Reivers, the adventurers are in what Lucius calls "foreign country, another county," the county that adjoins Yoknapatawpha to the north (78). Between Ballenbaugh's and Hell Creek bottom the countryside seems rural: along the road are "sprouting fields" (78). Lucius describes the residents they pass as "the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs . . . running toward the fence" to watch an automobile go by (78).

Sanctuary refers generically to the various residents of Oxford who see Temple in the evenings, as she hurries to or from a date. The group includes "townspeople taking after-supper drives," "bemused faculty-members" and graduate students (28).

Though their farms are "bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns" than those on the Mississippi side of Hell Creek, the Tennessee country people whom the travelers pass on the broad road that leads to Memphis in The Reivers are also "still in their Sunday clothes," sitting on their front porches ("galleries"), watching the world go by (91). And when they get closer to the city, "even the little children" who live along the road are no longer excited by the sight of a car (92).

These are the various inhabitants of the town in Flags in the Dust from which Young Bayard catches the train that takes him into exile. When he looks at them at the end of Christmas day, he sees various "cheerful groups," including children playing with new presents, youths exploding fireworks, and travelers waiting with friends in the racially segregated "waiting rooms" at the station (369).

The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" identifies a group of men who, "since the last year years, cannot find work" (64). The chronological reference probably points to the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era defined by mass unemployment and what the story calls "men among us now whose families are in want" (64).

Looking for a figure of speech to describe Clytemnestra as an old woman in Absalom!, Shreve says that she "shrunk" - "like the Bornese do their captured heads" (175). After Borneo was colonized, the Dayak practice of "headhunting" was widely sensationalized in Europe and the U.S. In Faulkner's short story "Vendee," set during the Civil War, the Sartoris family library includes a "book about Borneo" that describes such practices.

The people who live in the small hamlet of Division are one of the sources of information about the Starnes family that the narrator of "Hair" draws on. Once all the Starneses have died, these residents expect the Starnes' Alabama kin to claim the house. Division folks also note Hawkshaw's annual April visits to "clean up that empty house" (141), and in between they help themselves to the house's picket fence for firewood.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "The "folks," as Suratt calls the poor farmers and their families in "Spotted Horses" (165), congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. The Hamlet describes the group as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his aristocratic "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him," who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4).

In a facetious passage connecting the lost lock in 1826 to the future of the U.S., the narrator of Requiem for a Nun makes "a glorious prophecy" about the when when the American "people" will identify federal money with the "manna" of a generous god (17). They are described as "a race of laborers" whose only labor it to consume government funds (17).

The first time we see the town that the narrator of Light in August describes as a "railroad division point," the town's "whole air" is "masculine, transient" (173). On Christmas' last trip the narrator describes "the small, random, new, terrible little houses in which people who came yesterday from nowhere and tomorrow will be gone wherenot" live (211). In between the narrative refers specifically to only a few of these people, including some salesmen and the lawyer McEachern consults.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin has vividly creates an image the diverse group of human beings that he thinks of as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down (279, 346). It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed" together (279, 346).

In "By The People" the "People" are seen through several different lenses. For example, Gavin Stevens and his nephew, the narrator, divide them generationally: Gavin refers to "the ones of my age and generation" (133), and the narrator, to "the ones of my age and time" (134). In either case, however, the "people" evoked are white.

The Mansion represents the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha as a group in various passages. According to the text, for example, "not just the town but the county came too" to Flem Snopes's funeral (461). In these references readers get some idea of the average living conditions for Faulkner's rural characters.

Many different people from Yoknapatawpha appear in The Sound and the Fury. This is a group that exists only in Jason Compson's head, the "you" he is arguing with as he sits alone in his car while chasing his niece through the county: he compares his family to this hypothetical "you," as in "you all were running little shirt tail country stores" and farming poor soil while his "people" owned slaves (239).

The group from the county that attends Granny's funeral in both "Vendee" and The Unvanquished consists of both blacks and whites. The whites are "hill people" as opposed to townspeople; the "hill men with crockersacks tied over their heads" to shelter them from the rain are contrasted with the "town men with umbrellas" (98, 156). In a passage added to the novel, most of the blacks are described as having returned to Yoknapatawpha after following the Union Army to seek freedom (155).

The narrator of "Tomorrow" refers once to "all the people in our country - the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners" (91). He is explaining that, despite his Uncle Gavin's formal education at Harvard and Heidelberg, he knows how to talk to "all the people" so that they understand him. This is a rare passage in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which the population of the county is aggregated across racial and class lines, though the intent of the passage is apparently to praise Gavin rather than the county's shared community.

Elements of the (white) population of Yoknapatawpha are referred to in several ways in "Knight's Gambit." Their most pervasive role is as a kind of audience: "the county watches" the actions of the main characters unfold "as the subscribers [to a magazine] read and wait and watch for the serial's next installment" (149). For example, the people whom Gavin Stevens calls "the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes" share gossip and speculations about an unknown man who may have courted Mrs. Harris before her marriage to Mr.

In The Hamlet Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

As Popeye and Temple approach the town of Dumfries in Sanctuary, they begin seeing other people on the road, though the narrative refers to them in a complex series of phrases. In some cases it cites the means of transportation rather than the people: "pleasure cars Sunday-bent," "Fords and Chevrolets," "now and then a wagon or a buggy" (139). The only occupants specifically mentioned are "swathed women" in the "occasional larger car" and "wooden-faced country people" in trucks (139).

The group of people in The Mansion who admire the new Jaguar in which Linda Snopes Kohl will ride away from Yoknapatawpha consists of "men, boys, a Negro or so" (464); throughout the novel the people of Jefferson are often described as spectators, but the fact that this group explicitly includes blacks as well as whites makes it worth creating as a 'character' in itself.

In Flags in the Dust, Joan Heppleton goes back to her family's home town "from time to time" after her globe-trotting experiences, where she attracts the stares of the "neighbors, older people who had known her all her life," the younger people she had grown up with, and "newcomers to the town" (322). The narrative never says where "home" is (in Sanctuary we hear that Belle is from Kentucky), but it seems to be like Jefferson in the sense that Joan's obviously modern, emancipated behavior and appearance is something new and disconcerting.

There's no question that Henry Armstid has driven himself mad "spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy" ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 137) in his "spent and unflagging fury" (The Hamlet, 404) to find buried treasure where there is none. But in both these texts there is something equally disconcerting about the fixed stare on the faces of the country people who gather from many miles around to watch him dig for "a week" (in the short story, 136) or even "two weeks" (in the novel, 404).

This is the "someone in the Square" in "My Grandmother Millard" whom the Yankee officer asks "where General Compson lives" (675).

Cinthy, the former slave in Light in August from whom Hightower hears the story of his grandfather's death that he in turn tells his wife, says that it was never known who fired the shot that killed him. Hightower, however, speculates that the shooter "may have been a woman, likely enough the wife of a Confederate soldier" (485). While Hightower says "I like to think so. It's fine so," the uncertainties about his grandfather's death challenge his recurrent heroic image of the man.

Along with the "Memphis reporters taking pictures" who swarm around Hightower and his church the day after his wife's death (67), Light in August mentions "some photographers" who set up their cameras in front of the church (68), including one "cameraman" who catches Hightower grimacing behind his hymn book "as though he were smiling" (69). It's not clear if the "reporters taking pictures" and the "photographers" are two different sets of people.

According to Ab Snopes in "My Grandmother Millard," "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't copy the strategy that Mrs. Compson used to try to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676).

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses briefly trace the process by which several generations of planters, the white men who own the land, turned the wilderness into fields, using the labor of "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and "hired labor" ever since (270, 323).

In Light in August these policemen - from Little Rock or Memphis or perhaps some from each - come and get Joe Christmas and Doc Hines from the Little Rock orphanage and escort Joe by train back to the Memphis orphanage.

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men outside the South who, according to him, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery.

When describing the people who gather to stare at Joanna's murdered body and her burning house, the narrator of Light in August refers, briefly but very specifically, to three categories of people who are not just from the county or the "immediate neighborhood" or from town (287): one of these categories consists of "poor whites" who, like "the casual Yankees" and "the southerners who had lived for a while in the north," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).

The "clientele" of the store that Sutpen opens after returning from the Civil War in Absalom, Absalom! includes blacks and whites from the area (147). Shreve McCannon uses the derogatory term "white trash" to describe the white patrons, though his use of the term also indicates that it is one he wasn't familiar with as a Canadian: "what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash" (147).

The man who works as a clerk in the university branch of the post office in Sanctuary is described as "young," with a "dull face," "horn[-rimmed] glasses" and "meticulous" hair (171). He tells Horace that Temple Drake has quit school. (Less than a decade before he wrote Sanctuary Faulkner himself had been the clerk in this post office.)

In the immediate aftermath of the South's surrender, according to Rosa's account in Absalom!, "men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns"; a deputation from this group unsuccessfully demands that Sutpen join them (130). Rosa never gives the group a name, but when she later describes their "sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses" it seems obvious that the Ku Klux Klan is being evoked (134). (There are entries for Klansmen in other texts in this index.)

The ministers in Jefferson, all of whom are Protestants, resent Eula for her open infidelity. Later in The Mansion, however, the town's "white ministers" cannot find a reason to "go on record against" Linda Snopes Kohl's work as a Sunday school teacher at "one of the Negro churches" (254).

According to The Town, the members of the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian churches in Jefferson constitute the two oldest congregations in the county, dating from "before the county was a County and Jefferson was Jefferson" (321).

The man the American M.P. in "Ad Astra" refers to simply as "your president" when he's arguing with the French officer is Raymond Poincare, who was President of France during World War I.

In The Sound and the Fury this man works in the town's printing shop. He advises Jason as to where he might find old checks from a defunct bank.

These are the prison workers in both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses who are in charge of Samuel Beauchamp's execution: the "armed guard" who stands outside his cell and the penitentiary officials who enter the cell and prepare Beauchamp for his execution (256, 351).

In "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin Stevens calls the warden at the penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, to gather information about Samuel Beauchamp.

These are the other captured U.S. and Allied servicemen in The Mansion with whom Charles Mallison is confined in a German "POW camp at Limbourg" during the Second World War (323).

When "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns that her former husband has married again "in a neighboring state," she travels to Memphis to engage a "private detective agency" to surveil him and his new wife. The story does not describe any of the individual detectives, but the agency sends her detailed accounts in weekly letters. (The history of American private detective agencies dates back to Allen Pinkerton, who started his National Detective Agency in 1850.)

The owner of the logging camp where Mink works in The Hamlet "lives openly" with a quadroon woman "most of whose teeth were gold" and who superintends the kitchen (262). (The term 'quadroon' appears in a lot of American literature before the Civil Rights movement; it was used to label a person with three white and one black grandparents. Faulkner scholarship uses the term to identify the woman in Absalom, Absalom! with whom Charles Bon has a child, but we identify her in this index as Mrs. Charles Bon.)

In "All the Dead Pilots," Sartoris and Spoomer, enemies in love, both belong to the same Royal Air Force unit, identified only as the "-- Squadron" in Kaye's letter to Aunt Jenny (530). The "whole squadron" is referred to several times by the narrator, also a member of the unit, but it is never made explicit how many men and planes this adds up to (521). (By 1918 there were 150 squadrons in the R.A.F.)

The "steward and marshal" at the races in The Reivers is a local "dog trainer" and hunter who is out on bail awaiting trial for "a homicide which had occurred last winter at a neighboring whiskey still" (229).

In Flags in the Dust this is the employee inside the train's baggage car. His race is not specified, and his reply to Horace's concern about the fragility of his glass blowing equipment makes it hard to determine it. Linguistically he sounds 'black': "All right, colonel. . . . we ain't hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us" (157). But his unsubmissive attitude toward the white Horace suggests he is 'white' himself.

This is the "express clerk" at the Jefferson railroad station in "Knight's Gambit" (255).