Character Keys

In "The Old People" and again in Go Down, Moses, this group of Negro hunters see "the sudden burst of flame" as Jobaker's hut burns down (204, 164). In the short story they are explicitly described as "possum-hunting" (204); in the novel they are just "hunting" (164).

Major de Spain's house servant in "Barn Burning" is "an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a linen jacket" (11). He tries to prevent Ab Snopes from entering the De Spain mansion, and then - unsuccessfully - orders Ab to "Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here. Major ain't home nohow" (11). At the end of the story, when Sarty bursts into the mansion to warn Major de Spain, this house servant is the first person that he encounters.

The "negro porter of the hotel" where Ruby stays in Sanctuary (135) briefly appears in three separate scenes: showing Ruby to her room in Chapter 16, fetching Horace to the hotel in Chapter 17, and showing Horace where he can wait for a train in Chapter 29. Faulkner may have been thinking of one man in all three cases, or two, or three.

In The Mansion Mink remembers that when he was younger there was a Negro in "the lot behind the Commercial Hotel" who would feed his mule for a quarter while he took the train to Memphis (313).

In The Hamlet this hostler finds the rented horse and buggy that the drummer who was courting Eula abandoned when he fled Yoknapatawpha.

The "headman" among the slaves in "Red Leaves" tells the servant Issetibbeha is still alive, and offers him food (332).

In "Knight's Gambit" this is the specific groom among the various stablemen who work for Sebastian Gualdres who is in charge of his blind "night horse"; Gauldres tells Gavin Stevens that this mare "is left in the stable by the negrito each afternoon" (227).

According to the brief and ambiguous account in The Mansion, while growing up white and male in Frenchman's Bend Mink Snopes has sex with a least one black girl: the "furious unplanned episodes" with an "almost invisible unwashed Negro girl" in a roadside ditch or the middle of a cotton field (317).

In Light in August this Negro girl is induced to have sex with a group of five white country boys in a deserted sawmill shed. When it is Joe's turn, he sees "something, prone, abject; in her eyes perhaps" (156), and his response is to beat her until the other boys restrain him.

At the gas station where Jason stops after leaving the Sheriff's house in The Sound and the Fury, this Negro employee fills Jason's tank with gas and his tires with air.

This man in The Hamlet advises another fireman who wants to borrow money from Flem Snopes, though he doesn't seem to understand how much the interest Flem has been charging him for "two years" is costing him (78). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

In The Hamlet this man works at Varner's cotton gin, and helps Trumbull overhaul the machinery (65). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

In The Hamlet Ratliff's revulsion at the idea of Eula Varner being married to Flem Snopes leads him to imagine what Flem's idea of sex is; the result is a disturbing image that probably tells us more about Ratliff than about Flem or anyone else: sex as a kind of business transaction with a "black brute from the field with the field sweat still drying on her" (181) who wants "a nickel's worth of lard" from the store (180).

In The Reivers the Sheriff says that Boon's white friends can "settle" the problem caused by his accidental shooting of a "Negro girl" by "giving her father ten dollars" (15). The father himself does not appear in the text.

In The Hamlet this farmhand buys the buggy that was used by one of Eula's suitors and drives it through the village "a few times each year" (165).

Driving out to the Caledonia cemetery on the Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust, Chick sees only a single Negro: a man plowing one of the fields along the road, "the face black and gleam[ing] with sweat and passionate with effort, tense concentrated and composed" (145). The white boy and the black man look "eye to eye into each other's face before the Negro looks away" (145).

The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit.

The young woman in "Delta Autumn" identifies the man in the boat that takes her to the hunting camp as her "cousin," but beyond that the story provides no details about the aunt's "family" in Vicksburg with whom she has been staying (278). (In the revised version of the story that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, this family is part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family.)

In The Town young Bayard has to swerve his car to avoid hitting this "Negro family in a wagon" (124). (In Faulkner's first account of this accident, in Flags in the Dust, Bayard swerves to avoid a white man driving a Ford.)

In keeping with entrenched traditions, the Holston House in The Mansion still has "Negro man waiters," some of whom are the sons of previous generations of waiters (421), and in the ladies dressing room there is "a maid" (422).

When Mrs. McKellogg takes the young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" back to what he calls "her house" (obviously, an apartment house, 97), he notes that the "little room without nothing in it" (obviously an elevator) is operated by "a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had" (obviously the operator, 97). With the exception of the narrator's reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the Negro employees of the apartment building provide the story's only (linguistically racist) mention of race.

One of two Negro drivers in The Town. He drives Uncle Billy around in Jody Varner's car.

This "negro in overalls" is the second driver in The Sound and the Fury: he agrees to drive Jason from Mottson back to Jefferson for four dollars (313).

The Negro servants who work for the white population of Jefferson are almost completely invisible in Intruder in the Dust. This is by their own actions: anxious about what might happen after Lucas is arrested for killing a white man, they stop going outside, even to work. But their absence provokes two descriptions of who they are, or at least what they look like, under conventional circumstances. On Sunday morning Chick imagines the "housemaids or cooks in their fresh Sunday aprons" on the porches of their employers' homes (38).

In "A Rose for Emily," this "Negro delivery boy" brings Emily the package of arsenic she purchased from the druggist (126).

In The Mansion Mink sees "a few Negroes" shopping - "trafficking" is the word the narrative uses - in "the small dingy store" in Memphis where he buys animal crackers (319).

In The Mansion the "young Negro man" whom Mink sees inside the small store in Lake Cormorant is wearing the "remnants of an army uniform" (286). He obeys the store proprietor's command to drive Mink down the road, but at the same time subtly tries to let Mink know that the white man had cheated him.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, six or seven men who work with Rider - three from his timber gang and three or four from the mill crew - are shooting craps with the white night watchman's crooked dice in the tool-room at the back of the mill’s boiler shed.

This group consists of the "girls" and "young men" - "probably the neighbors swapping the work" - who are helping to pick the unnamed Negro farmer's cotton in The Mansion (438).

In The Mansion this cotton farmer allows Mink to work and stay the night at his place. As a Negro he expresses himself carefully when talking with the white Mink, but he clearly has doubts about the story Mink has told him about himself.

The black woman who cooks Roth's food does not appear directly in Go Down, Moses, but he does speak to her "through the kitchen door" when he wants her to bring Lucas into the house (125).

Both The Hamlet and The Town mention the woman who cooks for the Varners. In the first novel, is mentioned as a sign of Will Varner's relative wealth. The narrator calls her the "only" servant of any sort in the whole district" (11) - though later the novel mentions two other Negro servants, a man and a woman, who work for Houston after his marriage. The Town describes the early hour at which she is forced to rise to cook Varner's breakfast for him (313).

In "Monk" Warden Gambrell has an unnamed Negro cook who works in his house as a trusty; when the warden's pistol goes missing, he has the cook "severely beaten" on the assumption that he stole it (53). Historically, there were female prisoners at Parchman's, but in this story it seems more likely Faulkner is thinking of the cook as male.

The first of the two Negroes who cook for Hightower in Light in August is a woman who is described as a "high brown" (72). She quits after Mrs. Hightower's suicide, when her presence as a woman in his house makes her and Reverend Hightower vulnerable to gossip and vigilante violence (72).

In The Mansion one of the two black servants who work for Flem in his mansion is referred to as the "Negro cook" (172). She is referred to by several characters and the narrator, and she passes close to Mink in the dark as she leaves the mansion to go home, but she is never described.

In The Town this cook lives and works in Manfred de Spain's "late father's big wooden house" (14).

This is the older of the two Negroes who work in Rogers' restaurant in Flags in the Dust. The narrative does not explicitly call him the cook, but since it describes the cooking that is going on and identifies the "younger of the two," Houston, as the waiter, it seems safe to assume this older Negro is the cook.

In The Sound and the Fury Dilsey, Frony, Luster, and Benjy walk to church past fellow churchgoers: "They emerged from the cabins and struggled up the shaling levee to the road - men in staid, hard brown or black, with gold watch chains and now and then a stick; young men in cheap violent blues or stripes and swaggering hats; women a little stiffly sibilant, and children in garments bought second hand of white people" (291).

In Light in August Joanna Burden leaves Jefferson several times a year, for "three and four days," during which she visits the various "negro schools and colleges through the south" that she supports (233). There she meets with "the teachers and the students" (234).

According to Ned in The Reivers, the "hollow" where they "stable" Lightning before and between races is on land "that belongs to one of Possum's [Parsham's] church members" (217).

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who call at the Sartoris plantation seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.

The procession at the Negro church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury consists of "six small children: four girls with tight pigtails bound with small scraps of cloth like butterflies, and two boys with close napped heads" (292). At the start of the service on Easter Sunday, the children "entered and marched up the aisle, strung together in a harness of white ribbons and flowers" (292). Later they sing with the choir "in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers" (293).

The Negro children in Yoknapatawpha remain out of sight in Intruder in the Dust along with their parents, but Chick pictures them where they "should have been" on a Monday morning in the county: "in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and wornout automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans" (143).

"Red Leaves" refers to the children of the slaves as "pickaninnies" twice: first when the servant sees them in the quarters, "naked in the dust" (328), and at the end, when he imagines the quarters and "the pickaninnies like ebony toys in the dust" (340).

The posse chasing Christmas in Light in August finds this child, "stark naked" and "sitting in the cold ashes on the hearth" beside his mother, when they kick open the door to her cabin (329). There is no indication of the child's gender.

The middle child in the family of black sharecroppers in Flags in the Dust who let Young Bayard sleep in their barn and share their Christmas dinner; of the gender of this child the narrative says only, and strangely, "The second one might have been either or anything" (364).

The black man who works for Colonel Linscomb as both "chauffeur" (269) and "houseman" (277) in The Reivers is also McWillie's father.

As Ratliff puts it in The Mansion, the "Negro" whom Manfred de Spain hires to drive him as President of the bank wears a "white coat and a showfer's cap" (174).

The Harriss' chauffeur in "Knight's Gambit" is described as "a strange Negro in a uniform who did nothing but drive and wash and polish" the automobile (158). "Strange" in this context means 'not native to Yoknapatawpha.'