Character Keys

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard distinguishes the "town people" who attend Granny's funeral from the "hill people" who are there as well. They include Mrs. Compson, who is one of the townspeople who arrange for the Episcopal preacher from Memphis to officiate at the funeral and who offer Bayard and Ringo a home until Colonel Sartoris returns from the fight. These people stand under umbrellas and get out of the way of Fortinbride and the hill people who bury Granny.

The various townspeople whom Pap and his son encounter during their brief visit to Jefferson in "Fool about a Horse" will probably remember the pair vividly. A group of pedestrians on the street has to "scatter" when the runaway mules come "swurging" into town (128), and another group in the alley behind the hardware store is treated to the sight of those same two mules apparently trying to hang themselves by their reins, like people "in one of these here suicide packs" (129). This second crowd is also described "all watching" as Pap and his son get ready to leave (129).

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163).

This entry supplements the "Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople" entry. It is necessary because, in addition to the major role that the white population as an aggregate plays in Light in August, the narrative identifies a number of behaviors specifically with the town's population of white males.

In a strange anticipation of its own narrative, Light in August introduces this "acquaintance" who lives "in the town" and who tells the "stranger" who has noticed the sign in front of Hightower's house a very abbreviated version of the story of Reverend Hightower, his wife, and his twenty-five years in Jefferson (59-60). Two pages later the part of the stranger new to Jefferson will be played by Byron Bunch and the same story will be told to him in greater detail by "them," a collective town-as-narrator (60-73).

The tailor in The Hamlet who makes Jody Varner's distinctive clothing - a "glazed collarless white shirt" fastened with "a heaving gold collar-button" and a jacket of black broadcloth (7) - is himself not described.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, this is the unnamed "officer" whom Samuel Worsham Beauchamp attacks when he is caught breaking into Rouncewell's store (258, 354).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," this "neighbor" is awakened when Zilphia "runs out of the house in her nightdress, screaming" (380). She - although the neighbor could be a man or a woman - summons the doctor.

In The Town, along with the Episcopalian minister Mr. Thorndyke, these three "pastors" - identified as "the Methodist, the Baptist, the Presbyterian" - call on Gavin Stevens at the request of their congregations to offer Gavin their assistance with Eula's memorial service. Gavin calls them all "Doctor" (359), but in the distribution of names Charles' narration clearly distinguishes between the Episcopalian and the other three; Charles calls Thorndyke as "our" pastor - i.e.

These men in The Town are described as Jefferson's "storekeepers and doctors and lawyers and mayors and such as that"; their "quiet and peaceful" suppers are disturbed by the sound of Manfred De Spain's car when he passes by the Mallison house (62).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin Stevens calls at the various offices and stores "about the square" and solicits funds to help pay the costs of bringing Mollie's grandson's body back to Jefferson and giving him a small funeral from "merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor and dentist and lawyer" (263) - this phrase in the novel adds "and barber" at the end (360). Some give him the "dollars and half dollars" he asks for, and some don't (265).

These merchants and sales clerks in Absalom! cater to Ellen Sutpen and her wealthy status during her "weekly ritual" of driving "store to store" in Jefferson by "fetching out" to her "the cloth and the meagre fripperies and baubles" for sale in their stores (57).

In Flags in the Dust the man whom Pappy and John Henry tell about Young Bayard's accident is an anonymous "merchant" in town; the merchant, in turn, tells Old Bayard.

These men appear in absentia in The Mansion as part of the explanation of how Otis Meadowfill ended up "choosing [Gavin] Stevens from among the other Jefferson lawyers" (367). As a county seat and the site of a federal courthouse, Jefferson presumably had quite a number of lawyers throughout its history.

This woman in The Town - identified by Charles' narrative only as "the first lady" (53) - reproves Maggie Mallison for calling on Eula Snopes.

in Requiem for a Nun there are several specific references to the "ladies" of a contemporary Jefferson. A hundred years after the town's naming, two ladies clubs argue over whether "to change the name back to Habersham" (7). (This group also appears in "A Name for the City," 202.) And it is only "a few irreconciliable old ladies" - in other words, ladies who have not reconciled themselves to the South's defeat in the Civil War - who refuse to forget the fact that during the war "a United States military force" burned the town Square (37).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, Bayard says that "all the ladies in Jefferson" (58) - in the second text this is revised to "all the women in Jefferson" (188) - travel out to the Sartoris plantation on several occasions: to confront Drusilla for her unlady-like behavior and to attend the wedding that will ceremonialize her return to their fold. The first time they appear, there are "fourteen of them," though that total includes Martha Habersham (63, 194). They all seem both curious and outraged by what they see.

The phrases "the women" (119) and "the ladies" (124) are used on several occasions in "A Rose for Emily" to describe the general opinion of all the women in town. They function as a particularly Southern kind of narrative chorus. Presumably, these phrases do not literally refer to every woman, or even every white woman (though they certainly do not include women of color), but rather the genteel white women whose own reputations are impeccable, and who can function as the self-appointed guardians of the town's good name.

This principal awards Wallstreet Panic Snopes his diploma in The Town.

In "Dry September," these are the young women of Jefferson are seen by Minnie Cooper when she goes out alone in the afternoons, as they stroll downtown "with their delicate, silken heads and thin, awkward arms and conscious hips" (175). The narrative calls them "cousins" of Minnie Cooper, using quotation marks to indicate that they are not actual relatives (175).

These are "the cops" in The Mansion who put out the burning cross in front of 'The Mansion,' i.e. the house where Linda Snopes Kohl lives with her father (252). The narrative says they were "outraged and seething of course, but helpless" - what they are outraged at, however, seems to be the fact that the house belongs to "THE banker" (252). (Faulkner usually identifies the police in Yoknapatawpha as sheriffs, deputies and marshals, but the term 'police' becomes more common in his later fictions; this use of the term 'cops' is even rarer.)

The white children of Jefferson don't directly appear anywhere in Intruder in the Dust, but Chick thinks of them three times. He remembers when he and the other "children on [his] street" played a card game with "an old lady" who lived nearby (58). And he notes the absence of the children who should have been on their porches on Sunday morning, "fresh and scrubbed for Sunday school with clutched palm-sweaty nickels" - but "perhaps by mutual consent" Sunday school has been cancelled (38).

Among the Jefferson people Hawkshaw barbers in "Hair" are children, to whom he gives peppermints.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin recalls a story that Mrs. Bland tells about Gerald, involving "a sawmill husband" - the lower-class husband of a woman with whom Gerald has had sexual relations - who confronts him with a shotgun (107). According to Quentin's remembered version, Gerald is supposed to have bitten the gun in two. It's not clear how much of the exaggeration here is Mrs. Bland's and how much Quentin's.

In The Mansion these Japanese troops attack the retreating group of Americans as well as "Aussies, British, French from Indo-China" somewhere in "Malaya" at the start of the Second World War (305). They are never seen, but readers hear them "chirping" in the dark just beyond a line of American foxholes. Their "English" is the stereotypical dialect that once was spoken by Asians in (white) American popular culture: "Maline" (i.e. Marine), "Tonigh youdigh" (306).

These "Japanese" should be understood to be 'the enemy' that the U.S. in fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two. The young narrator of "Two Soldiers" as well as his mother refer to the people who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84). In the later story "Shall Not Perish," the same narrator, a year older, refers to the country's enemy and the forces responsible for his brother's death as "them Japs" (101).

In addition to the present day jailer, Mr. Tubbs, Intruder in the Dust mentions but doesn't name the man who was the county jailer during the Civil War. Like Tubbs, he lived with his family in the jail. (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," Intruder in the Dust and "An Error in Chemistry" but with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

In "Monk," this "jailor" is there along with the "other prisoners" in the county jail when Monk attempts to "make a speech" after his arrest (42). (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," "An Error in Chemistry" and Intruder in the Dust with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

Listening to State Senator Clarence Snopes talk about the life he leads in the state capital of Jackson in Sanctuary, Horace conjures up images of "discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet doors" in various hotel rooms (175). That's all the narrative gives us, but it seems safe to assume that inside the skirts are women, and that the women themselves are prostitutes.

The unnamed "secretive" little girl (126) who somehow becomes attached to Quentin in The Sound and the Fury is the child of Italian immigrants, though it is possible that she herself - unlike her older brother Julio - was born in the U.S. Quentin describes her complexion as "like a cup of milk dashed with coffee," implying she is not exactly 'white' (125). She apparently can speak English, but when she meets Quentin at the bakery, she does not tell him who she is or where she lives, and she remains mysteriously silent while he travels with her in search of her home.

Italian marble appears in Yoknapatawpha in 4 different Yoknapatawpha fictions: the marble tombstones Sutpen has made for himself and Ellen are imported from Italy in Absalom!; the marble columns for the rebuilt courthouse in Requiem for a Nun are too; and so is the marble medallion that Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes order for Eula's monument in The Town, or the monument itself, referred to as an "outrageous marble lie" The Mansion (460).

In The Reivers Lucius has heard that the place he knew as Ballenbaugh's "is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger" (71). (It was illegal to buy or sell alcohol in Mississippi until 1966.)

On the interurban that carries him back to Cambridge in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin self-consciously notices how the other passengers in the car are all "looking at my [black] eye" (170). One passenger is individualized: looking at his reflection in the window of the car, Quentin sees superimposed on his own face the reflection of this woman sitting across the aisle from him, wearing a hat "with a broken feather in it" (169).

In The Town it is the wife of the furniture salesman in Memphis who knows what kind of furniture Flem wants for his new house, and she provides it. She is mentioned again as "the Memphis expert" who "learns Eula" what the home of a bank vice president should contain (173).

In The Town this man comes to Jefferson to determine his company's liability for Mrs. Widrington's lost dog.

The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that at least in Requiem for a Nun this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race.

These are the "other prisoners" in the jail in Light in August at the same time that Lucas Burch (Joe Brown) is there (303). They are only referred to by Buck Conner when he orders Burch to stop talking.

In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190).

In "That Will Be Fine" the youngest child of Uncle Fred and Aunt Louisa is not identified by name or by gender.

In Sutpen's account of life in the mountains of western Virginia in Absalom!, "the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights" (179).

The funeral ceremonies for Issetibbeha in "Red Leaves" include "almost a hundred guests" who travel in wagons and on foot to the plantation from elsewhere (331) - when the food runs out "the guests returned home and came back the next day with more food" (336), which may mean they are Indians from other tribes or clans. They are "decorous, quiet, patient" (331), and the descriptions of them repeatedly mention the "stiff European finery" and the "bright, stiff, hard finery" they wear for the occasion (331, 339).

In "Red Leaves" the tribe's women stay on the plantation with the old men and children rather than participate in the chase after the servant.

In "Red Leaves" this stripling attends to Moketubbe on his litter; his pert manner of speaking annoys the older men Three Basket and Louis Berry.

The Indian "doctor" who treats Issetibbeha in his last illness in "Red Leaves" weats a "skunk skin vest" (321) or "waistcoat" (329). He "burns sticks" in an unsuccessful attempt to cure his patient (322).

Like the women and old men in "Red Leaves," the tribe's children do not go out in pursuit of the fugitive slave.

In Absalom! Sutpen negotiates his acquisition of land "with or through" the "Chickasaw Indian agent" (25). The adjective is ambiguous, but it's unlikely the agent was a Chickasaw himself. Historically, Indian agents were white men who worked for the U.S. government as the official intermediary between white America and Native Americans.

The tenant farmers on Varner's properties in The Hamlet are described as "patient earth-reeking men" who meet with their landlord each year after they have gathered the crop they raised on his land "to accept almost without question whatever Varner should compute he owed them for their year's work" (67).