Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
2962 | Unnamed Negro Street Crews |
Like the other black inhabitants of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, the "street department crews" are no where to be seen on the Monday after Lucas is arrested, though this doesn't prevent the narrator of Intruder in the Dust from describing their usual employment: "flushing the pavement with hoses and sweeping up the discarded Sunday papers and empty cigarette packs" (119). One irony of Intruder is that the absence of the black population results in the narrative describing them in more detail than any other Yoknapatawpha fiction provides. |
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2544 | Unnamed Negro Strangers |
In The Hamlet these "strange negroes" are defined by their absence. According to the narrator, Negroes who are not already known in Frenchman's Bend stay out of the area, where the white population is known to be violent and hostile to them (5). |
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3546 | Unnamed Negro Store Manager|Owner |
While he's in Memphis in The Mansion, Mink goes into a "dingy store" where he sees a "Negro man" who seems to be "running it" and "maybe he even owned it": after all his time in prison Mink wonders if "the new laws" mean a black man "could even own a store" (319). |
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3545 | Unnamed Negro Stevedores |
The river in Memphis that Mink remembers in The Mansion was lined with "chanting stevedores" loading the riverboats (315). |
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2435 | Unnamed Negro Steamboat Hands |
This is one of the two groups of men in Absalom! from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon - a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) - deliberately provokes a racial reaction: "the negro stevedores and deckhands on steamboats . . . who thought he was a white man" (167). |
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1904 | Unnamed Negro Station Porter |
The "negro with a broom" in Sanctuary whom Gowan encounters when he wakes up in the Oxford train station is astonished at the young white man's disheveled appearance (35). |
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3747 | Unnamed Negro Stableman |
When Lucius and Lycurgus enter Linscomb's stable in The Reivers they see "a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear" (220). |
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1354 | Unnamed Negro Son of Vicksburg Aunt |
Just before the young woman enters the tent at the end of "Delta Autumn," Ike McCaslin sees, "sitting in the stern" of the boat that brought her to the camp, "a Negro man" (277). The boat is his, and he is the woman's "cousin," though unlike his, her race is not immediately apparent (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for Go Down, Moses, he made the young woman the granddaughter of James Beauchamp, and so made this cousin part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family. For that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database. |
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1585 | Unnamed Negro Soldiers |
These are the other black soldiers whom Caspey Strother mentions in Flags in the Dust in the stories he brings home from World War I. He never mentions any of their names, usually referring to them as "boys," but he does refer specifically to two: "de Captain's dog-robber" and "a school boy" (59). (It's unclear what Caspey means by "dog-robber," but he may be mangling the term 'dogsbody' - a British term for a person who does minor tasks; as an officer, the "Captain" in the phrase would be likely to have someone in such a menial role. |
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2617 | Unnamed Negro Shooting Victim |
At a "bleak" train station he is passing through in The Hamlet, Labove witnesses a white man shooting this "negro" (138). Although the Negro seems to be dying, and tells the "white folks" trying to help him that "I awready been shot," when his clothes are pushed aside the bullet that hit him "rolls out . . . bloodless" (139). |
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3396 | Unnamed Negro Servants of Doctor Peabody |
In Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody's household of black servants includes, to quote his dehumanizing description of them, "six or seven registered ones" as well as "a new yearlin' every day or so" (303). Like Abe, the only servant who is named, their main task seems to be assisting the gentlemen and ladies who come to fish at the doctor's pond. |
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1206 | Unnamed Negro Servants 4 |
These are the "other Negroes" mentioned by Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" - other than the "grooms" who tend to the horses and dogs - on the Harriss plantation (234). Presumably these are the servants inside the big house that Mr. Harriss built, but no other details about them are provided. |
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1205 | Unnamed Negro Servants 3 |
These are the "few Negro servants" in "Knight's Gambit" who worked for Mrs. Harriss' father in the past; they were the her only "companions" growing up (150). |
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1203 | Unnamed Negro Servants 2 |
In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow. |
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633 | Unnamed Negro Servants 1 |
In "Smoke" the servants of Old Anse Holland witness much of the tension between their master and his sons. On the night Young Anse leaves home for good, the scene was “of such violence that the Negro servants all fled the house and scattered for the night” (5). |
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1693 | Unnamed Negro Servant of Bland |
In The Sound and the Fury this man seems more a product of Mrs. Bland's imagination than a real person. One of the stories she tells about her son Gerald focuses on the loyalty of "his nigger," who pleads to be allowed to accompany his "marster" to Harvard (107). |
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1893 | Unnamed Negro Servant in Pensacola |
In Sanctuary this servant works for the unnamed wealthy woman who befriends Popeye's mother. She is not specifically referred to as a Negro, but since nearly all the domestic servants in the fictions are black, we have chosen to identify her that way. |
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1201 | Unnamed Negro Servant 2 |
In Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157). |
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1202 | Unnamed Negro Servant 1 |
Described in Flags in the Dust as "a thin woman in a funereal purple turban" who eats with gestures of "elegant gentility" while visiting with Sis' Rachel in the kitchen, she is presumably the maid of one of the white ladies attending Belle Mitchell's afternoon social (26). |
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3231 | Unnamed Negro Sergeant |
In "By the People" this Sergeant is serving in the Korean War when "single-handedly" he and Devries hold off an enemy attack to allow the escape of a trapped battalion (134). He is wounded during the action. This Sergeant appears again when The Mansion describes the same event, with one difference - in the novel the man's heroics occur during World War II (339). |
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1584 | Unnamed Negro Section Hand |
In Flags in the Dust, this railroad worker - referred to by Simon simply as a "section hand" (7) - is apparently the only witness to Young Bayard's 1919 return to Jefferson from World War I. It seems that he told Simon about it, and Simon in turn tells Old Bayard. |
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3543 | Unnamed Negro Schoolchildren |
After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). Like their teachers, these children are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). |
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2676 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Workers 2 |
Apparently except for Fentry, the workers at Quick's sawmill in Frenchman's Bend are all black. At least, when Isham Quick describes Fentry's arrival at the mill in "Tomorrow," he says he did "the same work" and drew "the same pay as the niggers done" (103). (In the larger Yoknapatawpha context, this is an exception to the usual absence of Negroes, except for a few domestic servants, in the Frenchman's Bend area.) |
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1290 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Workers 1 |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider is the head of "a mill gang" at the sawmill (239, 129). These other Negroes attend Mannie's funeral, and several of them try to help him in his grief. Some of them are also among the workers who shoot dice after hours at the mill. |
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1185 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Worker |
In The Town this man works with Eck Snopes at a logging mill. Gavin Stevens calls him "one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecilic" in describing his and Eck's disastrous attempt to set "a tremendous cypress log . . . onto the saw-carriage" (33). |
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1286 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Fireman |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the fireman who keeps the fire burning at the sawmill is described as "an older man" (243, 136). He shares his breakfast with Rider. |
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3179 | Unnamed Negro Residents of Jefferson |
There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190). |
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3542 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Porters and Waiters |
Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not. |
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3358 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Porters |
In The Town, these two men carry the medallion of Eula across the railroad platform to Gavin's car. |
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3541 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Fireman |
Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station in The Mansion (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro. |
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3359 | Unnamed Negro Pullman Porters |
Although they are unseen in The Town, Charles knows there are "pullman porters" on the train that arrives in Jefferson in Chapter 24 (377). Shortly after the Civil War a white man named George Pullman designed the original sleeper cars for passenger trains, and hired blacks, in many cases former slaves, to serve as the attendants in those cars. |
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1877 | Unnamed Negro Prostitutes |
The prostitutes who work at the less expensive Memphis brothel to which Clarence takes Virgil and Fonzo in Sanctuary are described as "coffee-colored" (199). Their dresses are "bright," their hair is "ornate" and their smiles are "golden" (199). |
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3540 | Unnamed Negro Principal |
The principal of Jefferson's Negro school in The Mansion is a "college-bred man" and, according to Gavin Stevens, a person "of intelligence and devotion too" (247). In his role as narrator of Chapter 9, Charles Mallison seconds Gavin's words, describing the principal as an "intelligent dedicated man with [a] composed and tragic face" (248). Along with the school's "senior woman teacher," he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247). |
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3184 | Unnamed Negro Preacher 2 |
Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends. |
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1719 | Unnamed Negro Preacher 1 |
In The Sound and the Fury this man is the regular preacher at the Negro church in Jefferson. Though he does not give the Easter sermon, he enters the church with Reverend Shegog and is described in sharp contrast to the "undersized" visiting clergyman: he is "huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat. His head is magisterial and profound, his neck rolled above his collar in rich folds" (293). |
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1197 | Unnamed Negro Porter 5 |
While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37). |
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1199 | Unnamed Negro Porter 4 |
This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191). |
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1198 | Unnamed Negro Porter 3 |
In Intruder in the Dust the narrator calls the man who opens up the door of the barbershop at six o'clock every morning and "sweeps out the hair and cigarette stubs" a "porter" (30). The brief passage about him suggests he may also work in the pool hall nearby. |
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1196 | Unnamed Negro Porter 2 |
In The Hamlet this man takes care of cleaning and keeping fires lit at the Savoy Hotel, where Mink's wife works while Mink is awaiting trial (288). |
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630 | Unnamed Negro Porter 1 |
According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel. |
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2148 | Unnamed Negro Planing Mill Workers |
Light in August never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this Character to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black. |
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432 | Unnamed Negro Paving Crew 2 |
In "A Rose for Emily," this crew of Negro men come from out of town to pave the town's sidewalks; the "singing" they do "in time to the rise and fall of the picks" [pick-axes] they swing is a source of entertainment to the town boys (124). |
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1583 | Unnamed Negro Paving Crew 1 |
Perhaps as another symptom of the "newness" of the town Horace and Belle move to in Flags in the Dust after her divorce, on his way back from the railroad station he notes that the street is "uptorn . . . in the throes of being paved" (376). The "lines of negroes" doing the work "swing their tools in a languid rhythm," singing "snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations" (376). Since they explicitly work in "lines," this may be a chain gang, and the men may be convict laborers, but that is not said explicitly. |
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1221 | Unnamed Negro Passerby |
In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke. |
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1582 | Unnamed Negro Parson |
This is the imposing-looking Pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who leads the delegation that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris, requesting him to pay back to the church the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund. The narrator describes him as "a huge, neckless negro in a Prince Albert coat . . . with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye" (282). |
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1997 | Unnamed Negro outside Jail |
This is the "someone" in "The Hound" to whom one of the Negroes in jail is yelling through the window (163). It could just as easily be a woman as a man, but while the race is not specified, other Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which friends and family of black prisoners often gather outside the same window - not to mention the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, which makes it unlikely that a Negro in jail would be yelling at a white person - explain why we assume this "someone" is also black. |
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651 | Unnamed Negro Old Woman 3 |
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this is the "one old woman" among the huge group of self-emancipated slaves crowding toward the river and the Union army; she tries to get a ride on Rosa Millard's wagon so that she can "see the water before she died" (48, 103). |
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1219 | Unnamed Negro Old Woman 2 |
This is the "old negro woman" in Light in August who sits, "smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth," whom Joe Brown calls "Aunty" when he asks her to help him get a message to the sheriff (433-34). At first she refuses, saying that the one black man she knew who "thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him . . . aint never come back" (434). |
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1218 | Unnamed Negro Old Woman 1 |
When Popeye's mother gets sick after her husband abandons her in Sanctuary, she goes to this "old negro woman" rather than a doctor, and the woman "tells her what was wrong" (304). The narrator doesn't tell us, but the problem is probably syphilis. |
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3717 | Unnamed Negro Old Man |
When he describes his situation on the verge of launching the forbidden trip to Memphis in The Reivers, Lucius says "I was in the position of the old Negro who said, 'Here I is, Lord. . . ." (62). He (or Faulkner) may have a specific person in mind, but this tempted black man seems more like the product of Lucius' imagination, and a suggestive one at that. |
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2147 | Unnamed Negro Nursemaids |
According to the narrator of Light in August, "few of the townspeople" take any notice of the sign in front of Hightower's house (58), but "now and then" an "idle and illiterate" "negro nursemaid with her white charges would loiter" and spell out the letters on it (59). |
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3088 | Unnamed Negro Nursemaid |
The nursemaid who takes care of Mrs. Harriss' son Max in "Knight's Gambit" is "a light-colored Negress a good deal smarter, or at least snappier-looking than any other woman white or black either in Jefferson" (158). The Mansion also refers to this character as "the nurse," but does not otherwise describe her (217). |
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2146 | Unnamed Negro Neighbors of Joanna Burden |
Although the white people of Jefferson shun Joanna Burden in Light in August, the people of the local black community have close ties with her, as indicated by the footpaths from their cabins to her big house, paths which "radiate from her house like wheelspokes" (257). She "visits them when they are sick," Byron tells Lena, "like they was white" (53). |
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2054 | Unnamed Negro Neighbors |
Near the conclusion of "Centaur in Brass" Faulkner reveals that Flem Snopes lives in a bungalow on the bedraggled outskirts of town in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168). |
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1581 | Unnamed Negro Musician 2 |
One of the "three negroes" in Flags in the Dust who accompany Young Bayard on his drunken trip to the neighboring college town to serenade the co-eds. He plays either the bass viol or the guitar. |
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1580 | Unnamed Negro Musician 1 |
One of the "three negroes" in Flags in the Dust who accompany Young Bayard on his drunken trip to the neighboring college town to serenade the co-eds. He plays either the bass viol or the guitar. |
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1875 | Unnamed Negro Murderer |
Sanctuary does not name this man, except as the "murderer" (114) who is awaiting his execution in the jail when Goodwin is locked up there. He killed his wife with a razor. According to another unnamed black character, he is the "bes ba'ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!" His constant singing of "spirituals" and blues songs in jail, accompanied by a "chorus" of other blacks outside the window, provides a kind of soundtrack for the novel's main narrative (114-15). |
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1874 | Unnamed Negro Murder Victim |
This is the "wife" of the convicted murderer who is in the jail when Goodwin is arrested (114). While Sanctuary never gives her a name, or explains why her husband killed her, the narrative does provide a very vivid description of her death. |
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1291 | Unnamed Negro Mourners |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the Negroes who gather at Mannie's funeral are "the meager clump of [Rider's] kin and friends and a few old people who had known him and his dead wife both since they were born" as well as the men Rider works with at the mill (238, 130). |
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1417 | Unnamed Negro Mothers |
While hiding in the stable, the servant in "Red Leaves" imagines the scene of the other slaves drumming and dancing three miles away at the river. Included in the scene are the "women with nursing children," feeding them from "their heavy sluggish breasts"; they are described as "contemplative" and "oblivious of the drumming" (329). |
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1195 | Unnamed Negro Moonshiner 2 |
In Intruder in the Dust this is the man who is "tending" the moonshine still that the Sheriff discovers (228). Claiming to know nothing about it, he takes care of the Sheriff, and the problem, by making him comfortable and offering him a drink or two or more of "water" (228). |
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629 | Unnamed Negro Moonshiner 1 |
In Go Down, Moses Lucas recalls this earlier source of competition for his moonshine business. Lucas takes a kind of pleasure in remembering how he got this man sentenced to prison. |
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2615 | Unnamed Negro Mistress |
This woman is the daughter of one of Jack Houston's father's renters. Jack has a relationship with her. She is "two or three years" his senior (228). |
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1194 | Unnamed Negro Messenger 3 |
This is the young black man in "Barn Burning" whom Abner Snopes sends to Mr. Harris to tell him that "wood and hay kin burn" (4) - Ab's barely disguised way of threatening to burn Harris' barn. This messenger never appears directly. In his testimony against Ab, Harris calls him a "strange nigger" (4), a term that in the context of the story and the South at that time means he is a black person whom Harris has never seen before. |
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1193 | Unnamed Negro Messenger 2 |
The narrator of Light in August identifies the black man who rides to the Sheriff's house in Jefferson "on a saddleless mule" to report Christmas' violent disruption of the "revival meeting" at "the negro church" only as "the messenger" (322, 323). He is anxious to convince the Sheriff that the blacks had not been "bothering" Christmas beforehand (324). |
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628 | Unnamed Negro Messenger 1 |
In "Smoke" Granby Dodge sends this man to ascertain from Gavin Stevens “if the way in which a man died could affect the probation of his will” (36). |
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2097 | Unnamed Negro Men in Dreams |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant, Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). The dreams that feature "negro men" cause her to "wake wide-eyed" (380). |
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1885 | Unnamed Negro Men in Brothel |
These "two shabby negro men" in Sanctuary whom Clarence, Virgil and Fonzo see arguing with a white man in the hallway of the Negro brothel in Memphis; they may work there (as bouncers, perhaps), or may be customers themselves (198). |
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2285 | Unnamed Negro Men at Picnic |
These black men in "A Bear Hunt" were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash. |
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2284 | Unnamed Negro Men at Hunting Camp |
An unspecified number of black men are present in the hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Their role in the annual hunt is to cook and do other odd jobs around the camp. As blacks and as servants, they tend to be ignored or not noticed by the white hunters except when they are sought for some reason, as happens when Major de Spain calls for Old Man Ash to fetch him a drink when Ash has gone to the Indian mound. One of these other black servants appears with the "demijohn and fixings" and reports that Ash has gone "up to'ds de mound" (74). |
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1190 | Unnamed Negro Man 4 |
In The Reivers this man emerges from the crowd to help Luster carry the wounded unnamed black girl to Dr. Peabody's office. |
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1192 | Unnamed Negro Man 3 |
This is the "inscrutable" man in Light in August - "either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth" (435) - who takes Lucas Burch's note to the sheriff. A bit later, this man points Byron Bunch toward Burch. |
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1191 | Unnamed Negro Man 2 |
This is the Negro in Light in August whom Sheriff Kennedy forces to talk about the situation at the Burden place. At first the man pleads ignorance but then, after being whipped by the deputy, says "It's two white man" who have been living there (293). He tells the Sheriff that he doesn't live nearby, but "down the road" (292). |
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1189 | Unnamed Negro Man 1 |
This is the man in Flags in the Dust who provides Byron Snopes with the Ford car in which he flees Yokapatawpha after robbing the bank. He is identified simply as "the negro [Byron] sought," and Byron finds him just off the Square, on a "street occupied by negro stores and barber shops" (272). |
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1188 | Unnamed Negro Mammy 2 |
In The Reivers Lucius notes that Everbe "has a nurse" to help her take care of her newborn son (298). |
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626 | Unnamed Negro Mammy 1 |
The mammy who takes care of Narcissa and Bayard's new-born son at the end of Flags in the Dust is referred to only as "the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours" (395). |
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1381 | Unnamed Negro Maids |
In Sanctuary Ruby mentions the various black maids to whom she used to give nightdresses "after one night" wearing them in her work as a prostitute (75). |
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1187 | Unnamed Negro Maid 2 |
In The Reivers this "uniformed maid" helps serve supper at Colonel Linscomb's (277). |
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625 | Unnamed Negro Maid 1 |
In "Red Leaves" this enslaved woman travels as a maid with the West Indian woman, Issetibbeha's mother, on her trip from New Orleans to Doom's plantation. |
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2145 | Unnamed Negro Letter Writers |
In Light in August Joanna Burden conducts a steady and voluminous correspondence with "the presidents and faculties and trustees" and "young girl students and even alumnae" of various southern Negro schools and colleges. In her replies Joanna sends them "advice, business, financial and religions" and "advice personal and practical" (233). |
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3178 | Unnamed Negro Leaders |
According to the narrator of Requiem for a Nun, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87). |
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1935 | Unnamed Negro Laundresses 2 |
Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun" begins by evoking the "Negro women" who used to carry the clothes they had washed for their white customers in bundles on their heads (289); now they fetch and deliver it in automobiles or have lost their jobs to commercial laundry services. |
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1720 | Unnamed Negro Laundresses 1 |
In The Sound and the Fury these women are washing clothes in the creek that runs besides the golf course and the Compson place; "one of them is singing" (14). |
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3500 | Unnamed Negro Laborer |
In The Mansion Res Snopes employs "a hired Negro" to help him build a fence (363). |
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1380 | Unnamed Negro Janitor 3 |
In The Mansion, the first man inside the Baptist church every Sunday morning is "the Negro that fired the furnace" (63). |
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1186 | Unnamed Negro Janitor 2 |
In The Town, this man works at the Bank of Jefferson, where he "sweeps the floor every morning" (290). |
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624 | Unnamed Negro Janitor 1 |
When Chick sees lights in Gavin Stevens' office in Intruder in the Dust, he thinks that sometimes "the janitor forgot to turn them off" (207). |
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1200 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 6 |
In her account of Nancy's arrest in Requiem for a Nun, Temple describes in moving detail the "Negro prisoners" whose hands can be seen lying between the bars of the jail's windows. Initially she describes them as "the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murdresses too," but her representation of them also includes the kinds of labor and domestic work they perform (plowing and rocking cradles and so on) as a crucial part of Yoknapatawpha's economy (155). She compares them to the more privileged "white persons" (155). |
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2947 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 5 |
When Sheriff Hampton goes out to investigate Vinson Gowrie's grave in Intruder in the Dust, he takes along two Negro prisoners from the jail to do the digging. Both are dressed in "blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore" (136; in this context "street gangs" are chain gangs or convict work gangs). The narrative makes no effort to distinguish these "two Negroes," as they are repeatedly called (154, 156, 157, etc.). Both are equally anxious about their task, especially when Vinson's father appears. |
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1430 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 4 |
The five other black men in the county jail where Lucas is held in Intruder in the Dust are described by the narrative as the "crap-shooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers" who are kept in a single large room on the second floor (30). Some of these Negro prisoners are assigned to what the narrative calls the "street gang" that works outside the jail maintaining town property (54). |
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1289 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 3 |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the other inmates of the county jail where Rider is being held are described in crude burlesque terms when the deputy sheriff tells his wife how he ordered them to try to restrain Rider in the jailhouse: he calls them "the chain-gang niggers" and describes them as "a big mass of nigger arms and heads and legs boiling around on the floor” (255, 151). |
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1429 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 2 |
In The Hamlet the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes are described as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285). |
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631 | Unnamed Negro Inmates 1 |
In the "common room" beside the cell holding Cotton in "The Hound" are the men the narrative calls the "minor prisoners": "a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets" who have been jailed for vagrancy, selling whiskey and shooting craps (163). One of them is at the window, "yelling down to someone" outside the jail (163), and one talks to Cotton, telling him to "Hush up, white man," when he starts going into detail about Houston's corpse (164). |
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1876 | Unnamed Negro Inmate |
"Somewhere down the corridor" of the Alabama jail where Popeye awaits trial for murder in Sanctuary "a negro was singing" (310) - not unlike the "negro murderer" who is awaiting his execution in the Jefferson jail where Lee awaits his trial much earlier (114). |
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1419 | Unnamed Negro Infants |
While hiding in the stable loft, the servant in "Red Leaves" imagines the scene of the other slaves drumming "three miles away" (329). In his mind he sees "men children" being nursed by the women around the drum circle (329). |
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3811 | Unnamed Negro Infant in "Raid"|The Unvanquished |
This infant, described only as "a baby, a few months old," is seen in the arms of the self-emancipated Negro whom Rosa and her party encounter on their way to Hawkhurst. |
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1718 | Unnamed Negro in Virginia |
In The Sound and the Fury Quentin sees this man in Virginia, from the window of the train carrying him back to Yoknapatawpha from Harvard for the holidays. He is sitting patiently on a mule without a saddle, "waiting for the train to move" (86). When Quentin calls out "Christmas gift!" to him, he replies, "Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you" (87). To Quentin, he seems "like a sign put there saying You are home again" in the South (87). |
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3177 | Unnamed Negro Iceman |
Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.) |
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1934 | Unnamed Negro Husbands |
In the old days described by Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun," the husbands of the town's Negro laundresses sometimes "fetch and deliver" the clothes their wives have washed (290). |
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2144 | Unnamed Negro Husband 2 |
This man never appears in Light in August; he loses his shoes when his wife swaps "her husband's brogans which she was wearing at the time" for the shoes Joe Christmas is wearing (329). |