Character Keys

This is the unnamed Union soldier who annoys his superior officer by laughing at Ringo's evasion of the Union lieutenant's questioning in both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Riposte in Tertio."

In the story Aunt Jenny tells in Flags in the Dust about her brother Bayard's death on a cavalry raid with J.E.B. Stuart in Virginia, they ride back and forth several times through hundreds if not thousands of Union soldiers. These soldiers include "astonished picket-parties returning placidly to camp" and "fatigue parties setting forth with picks and axes and shovels" (13); they are described most vividly as "blue-clad pigmy shapes" that "plunge scattering before and beneath" the force of twenty Confederates (14).

Two of the Unvanquished stories - "The Unvanquished" (titled "Riposte in Tertio" in the novel) and "Vendee" - refer generically to the Yankee troops after they have left Mississippi: "there ain't a Yankee regiment left," says Ab Snopes in "The Unvanquished" (87, 139). He is wrong, but by the next story they have in fact all moved away to continue fighting elsewhere in the South. In "Vendee," in their absence, Uncle Buck says Grumby's viciousness makes "even the Yankees" look good in comparison (105, 169).

This is the first of the Union units engaged by the narrative of "My Grandmother Millard": the "whole regiment of Yankee cavalry" that, according to Ab Snopes, is "half a mile down the road" from the Sartoris place (674). (A Union regiment could be as large as 1000 men.)

These are the first Union troops to appear in Jefferson, according to "My Grandmother Millard": a "Yankee scouting patrol" that was apparently looking for General Compson "over a year ago" (675). That would have been before April, 1861 - implausibly early in the Civil War for Union troops to be moving through Mississippi.

As recounted in Intruder in the Dust, in 1864 these Union troops took control of Jefferson by force and "burned to rubble" the "courthouse and everything else on or in the Square" (48-49). When Requiem for a Nun refers to this same event, it calls the Union troops who did the burning a "United States military force" (37).

In Flags in the Dust and again in "Retreat" both as a short story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union soldiers is captured by Colonel Sartoris. In the first novel he does so single-handedly, but in the next to he has some (involuntary) help from Bayard and Ringo. In those two texts we assume this group is the "column of Yankee infantry" that earlier passes by Bayard and his father's troop hiding in the woods (30, 67).

Although Yankee soldiers do not appear directly in Light in August, according to the account of Van Dorn's cavalry raid that Hightower tells his wife Jefferson was "a garrisoned town," meaning that Union soldiers were stationed there, and to attack it the troop with which his grandfather rode had to travel "for a hundred miles through a country where every grove and hamlet had its Yankee bivouac" (483).

In both the short story "Raid" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Raid," these "Yankees" are not seen, but their actions are represented in the text by the ruins they have left behind them. They have been destroying railroads and burning plantations across Mississippi and Alabama, including the Sartoris place and Hawkhurst.

While no Union troops appear directly in "Skirmish at Sartoris," either as a story or as a chapter in The Unvanquished, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (58, 188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (65, 198).

In an event added to "Raid" in the novel The Unvanquished, Drusilla Hawk recounts a dramatic contest, "like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time," between two trains, one manned by Confederates and the other in pursuit, manned by these Union forces (98). Drusilla labels the train itself "the Yankee one," does not describe the men who are driving it (96).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses the "United States Attorney" who is present during Judge Gowan's hearing on the case against Lucas and George is an outsider who "moved to Jefferson only after the administration changed eight years ago" (222, 70). This probably makes him an appointee of President Franklin Roosevelt, though that is not said explicitly. He is described as both "angry-looking" (221, 70) and "angry" (222, 71). Secure in his local knowledge and authority, Judge Gowan ignores his one exasperated but uncompleted remark.

Sanctuary provides a generic description of the male "students in the University" who date Temple on the weekends. They are characterized almost entirely in terms of their clothes - "hatless" even when outside, wearing "knickers and bright pull-overs," or at dances the formally clad "black collegiate arms" and pairs of "black sleeves" (29).

The University of Mississippi opened in 1848, and became co-educational in 1882. According to The Hamlet, the male and female students who are there with Labove generally ignore him.

Horace Benbow's description in Flags in the Dust of the glass-making craftsmen he saw in the caves of Venice is suitably picturesque: "At first they're just shapeless things . . . shadows on the bloody walls . . . And then a face comes out, blowing . . ." (165).

In The Town these veterans who served in McLendon's company in the first World War return to Jefferson early in 1919, "except two dead from flu and a few in hospital," "all home again to wear their uniforms too around the Square for a while" (123).

Veterans who have returned from fighting in the Second World War are a major element of the social landscape in the second half of The Mansion. Goodyhay's unconventional congregation is made up mainly of vets, or their surviving parents and spouses; one of them wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been" to the church service (305). Because they know what "Devries's medal meant," veterans form an important element in the anti-Snopes coalition during the 1946 Congressional election (346).

During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' account of it in Go Down, Moses, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277).

Will Varner's picnic is attended by "every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules" (348). The Mansion takes for granted the fact that "every voter" is white.

In Light in August this good-natured man gives Lena Grove a ride from Varner's Store to Jefferson; on the outskirts of the town, they see the smoke from Joanna Burden's burning house.

In The Hamlet this man passes by Varner's store on his wagon and greets the men there.

This generic 'wagon driver' is mentioned in the summary description of the fifteen years Joe Christmas spends on "the street" (223) in Light in August. Joe's long strange trip is epitomized by all the rides that he begs on "country wagons" with the "driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask" (224).

At the "confectionery-lunchroom" called the Shack in Sanctuary, the "man in a soiled apron" who brings fixings to Gowan may be the owner as well as a waiter and cook (33). Gowan calls him "Cap" (short for captain?), but since he has never been to the Shack before that is obviously a generic name.

Waiters appear in both scenes set in the Grotto club in Sanctuary. In Chapter 25, describing the funeral for Red, they are clearly identified as "negro waiters, in black shirts beneath starched jackets." In the previous chapter, however, the narrative describes the two waiters who place drinks in front of Temple and Popeye in more racially ambiguous terms: seen from Temple's perspective they appear as "a brown [hand] in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff" (235). Also in Chapter 24, "a waiter" shows Temple to a private room, where Red joins her (238).

In The Unvanquished Bayard assumes this "watchman" or "picquet" must have been watching to report his arrival at Sartoris to the other veterans of "Father's old troop" (232); he does not actually appear in the novel.

When Nathaniel and Juana get married in Kansas, Joanna tells Christmas in Light in August, "everybody they could get word to or that heard about it, came" (250).

In "A Courtship" the "whisky-trader" who apparently makes regular visits to the Chickasaws brings the whiskey on which the tribe's young men get Log-in-the-Creek drunk (364). What he trades his whiskey for is not specified.

In Intruder in the Dust Lucas commissions "a white boy . . . on a mule" to carry the gallon bucket of molasses he is giving Chick into town (22).

Requiem for a Nun identifies the voters in Yoknapatawpha during the hundred years after the building of the courthouse in 1835 as "the white male citizens of the county" (37). Historically of course, a pair of Constitutional amendments gave black males the right to vote in 1870 and women the vote in 1920, but perhaps the novel is reminding us about the peculiar (unwritten) constitution of the world Faulkner is representing.

"Red Leaves" says that "a white man" taught Issetibbeha how to take snuff (321). It does not say anything about the man.

In Absalom! Wash Jones recruits this person - identified only as "another white man" (121) - to help with Charles Bon's burial.

In The Reivers, this "white man" is the "blackguard" who takes advantage of Bobo's "country-bred" naivete to get him in debt, and then forces him to steal the horse named Coppermine (281).

These characters are created by an implication in "That Evening Sun." When Mr. Compson tells Nancy that she should "just let white men alone" (295), he suggests that Mr. Stovall may not be the only white man with whom she has had sex. So by that implication, these are the other men who buy sex from Nancy.

These are "the white men" from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon, a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) in Absalom!, deliberately provokes a racial reaction: they refuse to believe he was "a negro," believing instead that his relationship with her proves that he was "besotted" by "sexual perversion" (167).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard refers to the men who work with John Sartoris to resist any effort to give voting rights to the recently emancipated slaves as "all the men in the county" and "all the other men in Jefferson" (69, 58; 204, 188). They assemble in the town square "with pistols in their pockets" (69) to prevent black men from voting, and ride out afterwards to the Sartoris place with John and Drusilla to cast their own votes in the election.

Most of the time if Faulkner's narrative does not specify someone's race, it is safe to assume they are 'white,' and the majority of the characters in Light in August are 'white' too. But the "white people" this entry specifically refers to are the residents of Jefferson who live in the neighborhood next to the town's black district, whom Christmas sees during his walk on Friday evening.

Clarence Snopes invents this soldier as part of his smear campaign against Devries in The Mansion, spreading the rumor that during the war Devries chose to save the Negro soldier and left this white one to die (345).

These "properly-educated white teachers" appear in The Mansion as an idea: they are the teachers whom Linda Snopes Kohl wants Jefferson to hire to instruct the students who attend the town's "Negro school" (250).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the crowd that watches as the coffin carrying Samuel Beauchamp is taken off the train contains a "number of Negroes and whites both" (265, 363). The Negroes include "men and women too," but the white people there are described as "idle white men and youths and small boys"; there do not seem to be any white women among the spectators (265, 363).

In The Hamlet this Memphis wholesaler provides Ratliff with his sewing machines.

In The Unvanquished this woman - even though she is dirt poor (literally, as she lives in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills") - maintains her pride by throwing back the money John Sartoris offers her after he shot her husband (221).

The wife of the German prisoner in "Ad Astra" is described by her husband as "the daughter of a musician who wass peasant" (418). While he is at war, she lives in Bayreuth with their son. She keeps her husband informed by letter of significant changes in the family.

In The Hamlet Hoake McCarron is involved in a scandal with this wife of a "minor instructor" at the agricultural college he attends (151).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the wife of the deputy who narrates much of the last section of the story is described as "a stout woman, handsome once, graying now and with a neck definitely too short, who looked not harried at all but choleric" (252, 147). She is impatient with her husband, and preoccupied with her own concerns; her rapid movements between kitchen and dining room suggest her lack of interest in her husband's account of a black man's lynching.

In The Hamlet this woman tries to discourage her husband from pursuing Ike Snopes.

She stands in the doorway of her small farm house and watches Hub, Suratt and Young Bayard as they leave to go to town in Flags in the Dust. There is apparently reproach in her look, but in her "flat country voice," she speaks only one word, "Hub" (138).

In "Hand upon the Waters" Nate's wife appears in the novel only as another voice in the darkness at their cabin, when readers hear her telling her husband to "let them white folks alone" (80) - suggesting she has more authority over Nate than Gavin Stevens does.

In The Reivers the "fat iron-gray woman in pince-nez" who opens the door at the Parsham doctor's house might be his sister, but since he mentions his marriage a few pages later it seems more likely that she is his wife (185).

The Mississippi wilderness in Requiem for a Nun is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (10).