Character Keys

Wade Hampton fought with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He was a brigadier general during the fighting at Gaine's Mill in 1862. In The Reivers Lucius' great-grandfather was serving under Hampton as "a color-sergeant" until being wounded in that battle (278).

Walter is Willy Christian's janitor in The Town. "His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167). He and Willy have a lot in common, according to Charles Mallison, except that "if anything Walter was a little more irascible," and instead of morphine, Walter has a weakness for the store's "medicinal alcohol" (167).

Walter Ewell is a farmer in Yoknapatawpha, but in the six fictions where he appears or is mentioned he is always described as (to quote The Mansion) one of the "best hunters in the county" (34) - an assertion born out repeatedly on the annual hunting trips to Major de Spain's camp in the woods. When the unnamed boy in "The Bear" hunts his first deer on his own it is symbolically appropriate that "he borrows Walter Ewell's rifle" to do so (290).

The "daughter" of Wash Jones and the mother of Milly is not named either in the short story "Wash," were she is first mentioned (536), or in Absalom!, where she plays a somewhat more visible role, but she has her own entry as "MELICENT JONES" in the "Genealogy" at the end of the novel (308). In the novel itself, she lives with her father for some years in the "abandoned" fishing camp at Sutpen's (99). The daughter she gives birth to there is "fatherless" (139).

In Flags in the Dust Watts is referred to as the owner of Jefferson's hardware store. (As the Jefferson story continues to grow across the course of Faulkner's career, identifying the owner of this store becomes more and more confusing to data enterers like us; Watts is only mentioned in this first text.)

Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43).

"Whitfield's cabin" is the first "church" in Yoknapatawpha (213, 23), and presumably the Whitfield who lives there is an ancestor of the "Reverend Whitfield" who is an important character in As I Lay Dying and also appears in several other fictions. Although this original Whitfield is only mentioned in "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, it seems safe to say that he is not a full-time preacher, but a settler who holds lay services in his cabin.

According to Mr. Compson, the scene in Absalom! in the Sutpen graveyard with Bon's wife and child "must have resembled a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde" (157). Wilde - who died in 1900, nine years before Mr. Compson would have said this - wrote in many genres, but in particular his poetry was an important influence on the apprentice work of William Faulkner.

Wendell Wilkie was the Republican candidate for President who ran against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940; he is mentioned in Go Down, Moses on a list of political figures that includes both Roosevelt and Hitler (322).

Will Benbow is presumably the only son of Francis. He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. He married Julia, with whom he had two children, Horace and Narcissa, and practiced law in Jefferson. He died a few years before the U.S. entered World War I. Narcissa remembers him in the first novel as "a darkly gallant shape" - "a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness" (172). He is not mentioned by name in Sanctuary, but only appears in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" (184).

Will Legate appears in four fictions, primarily as an accomplished hunter. He is a member of the Yoknapatawpha hunting party in "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, a son of one of Ike's "old companions, whom he had taught" the discipline of hunting (268, 320).

In "Hair," Will Starnes is the father of Sophie, Henry Stribling's (Hawkshaw's) first fiancee. He owns a house and land, all mortgaged. Starnes is lazy - some people suggest he may have died because "he was too lazy to keep on breathing" - and unambitious, "satisfied to be a landowner as long as he had enough to eat and a little tobacco" (138). He does not object to Sophie's engagement to Stribling, whom Mrs. Starnes considers to be beneath them.

Mentioned by a character in "Delta Autumn" as one of ominous signs on the horizon of contemporary events (269), William Dudley Pelley was a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter and publisher before making a name for himself a fascist and a religious leader. In 1936 Pelley ran for president as the candidate for the Christian Party, preaching antisemitism and socialism as staples for a new Christian Commonwealth. He supported Hitler's ideology regarding Jews.

Jefferson's daytime marshal in Intruder in the Dust, charged with helping the sheriff maintain order in the town. Among his duties is directing traffic so that the town's white school children can safely "cross the street" (133). His last name points to the fact that he is "a Beat Four Ingrum come to town as the apostate sons of Beat Four occasionally did" (133).

According to Mink's narrative in The Mansion, Fonzo Winbush's mother "wasn't a Snopes" (80). She tells Fonzo never to stay anywhere that isn't managed by a woman who looks "mature and Christian" and "most of all motherly" (80).

In The Mansion Grover Winbush's jealous wife is convinced that the nude woman pictured on the French postcard that Winbush brings home from Montgomery Ward was actually Winbush's "private playmate" (77).

The 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson led the country into the First World War and was still in office when Rafe MacCallum mentions his name, disparagingly, in Flags in the Dust (122). He is mentioned again in The Mansion, where the U.S. Declaration of War against Germany on April 2, 1917, is referred to as "the President's declaration" (204). In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson was one of the key promoters of the League of Nations.

This character's name reflects what is probably just be Faulkner's forgetfulness about recurring characters, though he may have had a reason for over-writing the Worshams with the Habershams between 1942 and 1948. In any case, the character named Belle Worsham in Go Down, Moses is the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356); the same character is named Eunice Habersham in Intruder in the Dust, where the narrative points out that the house she lives in "had not been painted since her father died" (74).

This "Mr Wylie" in The Reivers is a "family friend" of the Priests in 1905 (69). He lives on the place "eight miles from Jefferson" that his ancestor, "the first Wylie" in Yoknapatawpha, moved to sometime before the Civil War (69, 73). (In earlier editions of the novel his and his ancestor's name was Wyott.)

Miss Wyott is a teacher in Jefferson in The Town, but the narrative notes that her "own people" - that is, her ancestors - "had come from the country (her own branch of it remained there where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson)" (154). (In The Reivers Faulkner re-names the family that owns this spot Wylie.)

Mink Snopes' wife - given a first name, Yettie, in The Mansion, the second and last fiction in which she appears - plays a small part in the large saga of the Yoknapatawpha Snopeses, but has a very powerful backstory, as it's described in The Hamlet. Mink met during his travels, when after seeing her "standing in the savage lamp-light . . . in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp" (243-44), he called a halt to his travels and took a job at the camp. Her mother died in giving birth to her.

When Byron Snopes's four children step off the train in Jefferson, Chick describes the youngest as "a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man's shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent" (378). He never indicates the sex of this child, perhaps because he cannot determine it himself - or perhaps to emphasize the strangeness of the four as a group. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

In Flags in the Dust Fothergill is a member of Colonel John Sartoris' irregular unit, with a special ability to get behind Union lines and come back with at least one horse. He and the Colonel are horse racing when Sartoris surprises and captures the company of Yankee cavalry.