Character Keys

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.)

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

"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.

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).

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.)

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).

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).

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).

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).

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished the woman who opens the door of Ab Snopes' cabin to Bayard and Ringo is presumably his wife - at least, our database makes that presumption. She tries to throw them off the track by telling them that "Mr. Snopes" has gone to Alabama (101, 162). In The Hamlet Ab has two wives. This first one is named Vynie.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin led the Communist revolution against czarist rule in Russia, and was the head of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Gavin mentions him in The Mansion when he refers to Communist Russia as "Lenin's frankenstein" (259).

The only detail about Virginius MacCallum's ancestry provided in Flags in the Dust is that he received a mule from his father when he first got married. That one detail, however, makes it likely that his father also lived in Yoknapatawpha, and that he was a small farmer.

In "Smoke," Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15), but have different temperaments. Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, tries to mediate between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.

The biography of Virgil Snopes is one of the more unusual, even among the various Snopeses. When he first appears, in Sanctuary, he provides an occasion for comedy rather than alarm, as a sexually very naive young man who, on his first trip to the big city of Memphis, mistakes a brothel for a boarding house, and the prostitutes for the surprisingly large family of the landlady, Miss Reba. His friend and fellow babe-in-the-wood Fonzo takes him to another brothel, but afterwards Virgil complains about having to pay three dollars for something "you caint tote off with you" (196).

The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190).

In The Sound and the Fury Versh Gibson is the first-born son of Roskus and Dilsey. In the earliest scenes that Benjy remembers, he works as Benjy's caretaker. Sometime before his father's death he has moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis; Dilsey blames her husband for his "bad luck talk" that "got them Memphis notions into Versh" (31). He is mentioned again, briefly, in "That Evening Sun," but otherwise does not appear again in the fictions - not even in "Appendix Compson," where his mother, sister, brother and nephew are described living in Memphis in the early 1940s.

The "mammy" that Vernon Tull speaks of in As I Lay Dying is his biological mother - not a black caregiver or wet nurse, as would be the case with a 'mammy' in an upper class white Yoknapatawpha family. Vernon thinks of her in reference to the hard lot women have in life: she "lived to be seventy and more" having worked everyday of her life and never having been sick (30). At the end of that life she puts on "that lace-trimmed night gown she had had for forty-five years and never wore," lays down, and tells her family "I'm tired" (30).

Vernon Tull is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who appears in ten different Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying he narrates six of the novel's sections, which gives readers a particularly intimate connection to him; in these chapters he is one of the novel's more reliable commentators, particularly when he suggests that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71).

The "Vernon" who appears briefly in The Sound and the Fury is not Vernon Tull. This one is the husband of Myrtle, the Sheriff's daughter. He and Myrtle are in the Sheriff's house when Jason comes to report that he has been robbed.

In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

The Mansion mentions in passing that Will Varner looks "like what his father had been," a Confederate cavalrymen who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest (18).

Vardaman (and his twin brother Bilbo) are minor figures in The Town and The Hamlet, one of the three (or four, in the second novel) sons of I.O. Snopes and his second wife. Also like Bilbo, he is named for one of the segregationist politicians in modern Mississippi politics, in his case for James K. Vardaman, a very outspoken white supremacist who served as both a Governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman is the fifth and youngest child of Anse and Addie Bundren. He narrates ten chapters in which we follow the progression of a child's grieving process after the death of a parent. He also reveals poignant and specific examples of the poverty in which he resides. He is described by the other narrators as very small. (Vardaman is named after James K. Vardaman, who served one term each as Mississippi's Governor [1904-1908] and Senator [1913-1919]; he was a militant white supremacist whom his supporters called "The Great White Chief.")

In Sanctuary Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment after that.

This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).

In the "Appendix, Compson:1699-1945" that Faulkner wrote in 1946, seventeen years after The Sound and the Fury was first published, he traces the Compson patrimony all the way back to Scotland in the 18th century. The 1929 novel, however, contains only a few much vaguer references to the family history; Jason thinks, for example, about the "governors and generals" in the family past (230), and Quentin thinks that "one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals" (101). It's likely that the Compson that Mr. Compson mentions as his father's "father" (76) was the governor.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339).

For a long time prior to 1904, at least according to Charles' account in The Town, "the young people" of Jefferson accepted the rule of their elders, but De Spain's candidacy for mayor "was the opportunity which that whole contemporary generation of young people had been waiting for, not just in Jefferson but everywhere," to change the status quo (12). As voters, this younger generation gives De Spain a landslide victory: "they had displaced the old dug-in aldermen and themselves rode into office as the city fathers on Manfred de Spain's coat-tails" (14).

Identified as the "son of a carpenter," this "youth" in Flags in the Dust occupies only half a paragraph of text, but his story contains a number of intriguing details (181). Despite his blue-collar origin, Belle Mitchell decides to "make a poet" of him, and sends him to New Orleans presumably as part of that process (181). Faulkner also wanted to be a poet, and went to New Orleans at the start of his writing career.

Requiem for a Nun establishes the social status of Jefferson's "Female Academy" by referring to the value that a "certificate" from it has for "a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" (177).

In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

In Quick's account of Buck Thorpe's life in Frenchman's Bend in "Tomorrow," he mentions "about a half a dozen" other young men who both fought with Thorpe and often sat on the gallery at Varner's store listening to and laughing at his talk (109). The fighting is described as violent - he beats his adversaries "unconscious from time to time by foul means and even by fair on occasion" - and the talking is described as drunken (109).

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He assumes that the Judge is looking for his own wife, and he sympathizes with him because "It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you" (784).

This "youth in a battered ford" drives by the Mitchell house to pick up "the girl Frankie" (193) in Flags in the Dust. He is probably part of the young set that congregates around Belle Mitchell, and that her husband Harry describes as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). They seem to be just a few years younger than Horace or Bayard. (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.)

These young girls in "Hair" come "giggling down to the post office and soda fountain in the late afternoon" (141) to flirt with the young fellows.