Character Keys

At the "confectionery-lunchroom" called the Shack in Sanctuary, the "man in a soiled apron" who brings fixings to Gowan may be the owner as well as a waiter and cook (33). Gowan calls him "Cap" (short for captain?), but since he has never been to the Shack before that is obviously a generic name.

This generic 'wagon driver' is mentioned in the summary description of the fifteen years Joe Christmas spends on "the street" (223) in Light in August. Joe's long strange trip is epitomized by all the rides that he begs on "country wagons" with the "driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask" (224).

In The Hamlet this man passes by Varner's store on his wagon and greets the men there.

In Light in August this good-natured man gives Lena Grove a ride from Varner's Store to Jefferson; on the outskirts of the town, they see the smoke from Joanna Burden's burning house.

Will Varner's picnic is attended by "every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules" (348). The Mansion takes for granted the fact that "every voter" is white.

During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' account of it in Go Down, Moses, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277).

Veterans who have returned from fighting in the Second World War are a major element of the social landscape in the second half of The Mansion. Goodyhay's unconventional congregation is made up mainly of vets, or their surviving parents and spouses; one of them wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been" to the church service (305). Because they know what "Devries's medal meant," veterans form an important element in the anti-Snopes coalition during the 1946 Congressional election (346).

In The Town these veterans who served in McLendon's company in the first World War return to Jefferson early in 1919, "except two dead from flu and a few in hospital," "all home again to wear their uniforms too around the Square for a while" (123).

Horace Benbow's description in Flags in the Dust of the glass-making craftsmen he saw in the caves of Venice is suitably picturesque: "At first they're just shapeless things . . . shadows on the bloody walls . . . And then a face comes out, blowing . . ." (165).

The University of Mississippi opened in 1848, and became co-educational in 1882. According to The Hamlet, the male and female students who are there with Labove generally ignore him.

Sanctuary provides a generic description of the male "students in the University" who date Temple on the weekends. They are characterized almost entirely in terms of their clothes - "hatless" even when outside, wearing "knickers and bright pull-overs," or at dances the formally clad "black collegiate arms" and pairs of "black sleeves" (29).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses the "United States Attorney" who is present during Judge Gowan's hearing on the case against Lucas and George is an outsider who "moved to Jefferson only after the administration changed eight years ago" (222, 70). This probably makes him an appointee of President Franklin Roosevelt, though that is not said explicitly. He is described as both "angry-looking" (221, 70) and "angry" (222, 71). Secure in his local knowledge and authority, Judge Gowan ignores his one exasperated but uncompleted remark.

In an event added to "Raid" in the novel The Unvanquished, Drusilla Hawk recounts a dramatic contest, "like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time," between two trains, one manned by Confederates and the other in pursuit, manned by these Union forces (98). Drusilla labels the train itself "the Yankee one," does not describe the men who are driving it (96).

While no Union troops appear directly in "Skirmish at Sartoris," either as a story or as a chapter in The Unvanquished, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (58, 188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (65, 198).

In both the short story "Raid" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Raid," these "Yankees" are not seen, but their actions are represented in the text by the ruins they have left behind them. They have been destroying railroads and burning plantations across Mississippi and Alabama, including the Sartoris place and Hawkhurst.

Although Yankee soldiers do not appear directly in Light in August, according to the account of Van Dorn's cavalry raid that Hightower tells his wife Jefferson was "a garrisoned town," meaning that Union soldiers were stationed there, and to attack it the troop with which his grandfather rode had to travel "for a hundred miles through a country where every grove and hamlet had its Yankee bivouac" (483).

In Flags in the Dust and again in "Retreat" both as a short story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union soldiers is captured by Colonel Sartoris. In the first novel he does so single-handedly, but in the next to he has some (involuntary) help from Bayard and Ringo. In those two texts we assume this group is the "column of Yankee infantry" that earlier passes by Bayard and his father's troop hiding in the woods (30, 67).

As recounted in Intruder in the Dust, in 1864 these Union troops took control of Jefferson by force and "burned to rubble" the "courthouse and everything else on or in the Square" (48-49). When Requiem for a Nun refers to this same event, it calls the Union troops who did the burning a "United States military force" (37).

These are the first Union troops to appear in Jefferson, according to "My Grandmother Millard": a "Yankee scouting patrol" that was apparently looking for General Compson "over a year ago" (675). That would have been before April, 1861 - implausibly early in the Civil War for Union troops to be moving through Mississippi.

This is the first of the Union units engaged by the narrative of "My Grandmother Millard": the "whole regiment of Yankee cavalry" that, according to Ab Snopes, is "half a mile down the road" from the Sartoris place (674). (A Union regiment could be as large as 1000 men.)

Two of the Unvanquished stories - "The Unvanquished" (titled "Riposte in Tertio" in the novel) and "Vendee" - refer generically to the Yankee troops after they have left Mississippi: "there ain't a Yankee regiment left," says Ab Snopes in "The Unvanquished" (87, 139). He is wrong, but by the next story they have in fact all moved away to continue fighting elsewhere in the South. In "Vendee," in their absence, Uncle Buck says Grumby's viciousness makes "even the Yankees" look good in comparison (105, 169).

In the story Aunt Jenny tells in Flags in the Dust about her brother Bayard's death on a cavalry raid with J.E.B. Stuart in Virginia, they ride back and forth several times through hundreds if not thousands of Union soldiers. These soldiers include "astonished picket-parties returning placidly to camp" and "fatigue parties setting forth with picks and axes and shovels" (13); they are described most vividly as "blue-clad pigmy shapes" that "plunge scattering before and beneath" the force of twenty Confederates (14).

This is the unnamed Union soldier who annoys his superior officer by laughing at Ringo's evasion of the Union lieutenant's questioning in both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter in The Unvanquished titled "Riposte in Tertio."

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this is the soldier in the Union unit that raids and burns Hawkhurst who tries, unsuccessfully, to take Drusilla's horse away from her.

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this sergeant is in charge of the depot at the Union camp where the confiscated silver and mules, along with the self-emancipated Negroes who managed to cross the river, are held.

In "Raid" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished this sentry stands outside the tent to which Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo are taken after they cross the river.

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, this is the Union soldier who was captured by the Confederate unit camped outside Jefferson; according to its captain, this prisoner was sure that Sartoris had more than a thousand men in his troop.

According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.)

The officer in command of the cavalry troop Rosa Millard encounters at the river ford in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished is not named, but is clearly identified as "a heavy-built man with a red face" (54, 113). We get a good idea why he looks choleric when he reads the Rosa's requisition order and swears - behavior that suggests a lower class origin than the officers, Yankee as well as Confederate, elsewhere in the fictions.

This is the leader of the sixty Yankees whom Sartoris captures in "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished. The officer ruefully says, "Colonel, by God I believe you have fooled us" (31, 68).

The commander of the Union troop that comes to Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris appears first in Will Falls' account of the event in Flags in the Dust, and then again in Louvinia's slightly different account of the same event in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished.

The "fat staff-major" in Flags in the Dust whom Jeb Stuart and Carolina Bayard capture when they raid General Pope's headquarters (13). He takes his bad fortune stoically, but it is his assertion that "there is no place" for a gentleman in the war that provokes Sartoris into the act of bravado that results in his death (17).

As Rosa Millard and her group return through Alabama in "Raid" and The Unvanquished, they encounter a Union cavalry unit led by this lieutenant who, Bayard says, "didn't look much older than Ringo and me," sounds "like a girl" when he swears, and looks as if he's "fixing to cry" when forced to turn over his troop's horses to her (56, 116-17).

In Go Down, Moses Faulkner (or Cass) invents this "Yankee Intelligence officer" who finds Lee's "battle-order . . . on the floor of a saloon" (272). (The losing and finding of Lee's order actually happened during the Civil War, but in fact it was found by a Union corporal lying in the grass.)

In Requiem for a Nun the carpetbagger named Redmond associates himself with this general, "the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson" (183). (Historically, the Union forces who burned (but did not occupy) Oxford in 1863 were under the command of General Andrew Jackson Smith, who is mentioned as "General Smith" in other Yoknapatawpha fictions.)

In Flags in the Dust this cook is hiding inside General Pope's "wrecked commissary tent" when Carolina Bayard returns for the anchovies (18); the derringer shot he fires into Sartoris' back from his hiding place into Sartoris' back is fatal.

In the story Will Falls tells Old Bayard in Flags in the Dust about the Yankees arriving at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, this is "that 'ere other Yankee" who goes around the house looking for him at the barn (21); John fools him long enough to get around the corner before the man starts shooting at him. When this story is told again in "Retreat" and The Unvanquished this Union soldier, perhaps frustrated by not capturing John Sartoris in the barn, points his "carbine" directly at the two boys, Bayard and Ringo, "and shot at us pointblank" (34, 73).

In Go Down, Moses, this is the "body of raiding Federal horse" - i.e. a Union cavalry unit - that arrives at the McCaslin plantation sometime in 1862, causing the flight of Percival Brownlee (278).

In "Raid" and again in the chapter titled "Raid" in The Unvanquished, this is the outfit of Union soldiers who are riding through the countryside in Alabama when Ringo stops them in order to requisition additional property.

These are the Union troops, identified by Drusilla as "a brigade of cavalry" (45, 91), whom Bayard describes at the bridge over the river in "Raid" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished. Some of them are holding the crowd of self-emancipated slaves away from the bridge, others are preparing to blow it up, still others are described as "riding up and down the cliff" above the water or bivouacked "down at the water" (51, 108).

In both Flags in the Dust and "Retreat" as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union cavalry rides up to the Sartoris plantation hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris. In all three texts he is able to fool them long enough to escape, but in the last two the Yankees then dig up the family's buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

In Intruder in the Dust these "four or five men" take Jake Montgomery's body from the truck that brings it into town and through the back door into the funeral parlor (178).

One of the hypothetical characters in Light in August, this "undercover man" does not actually appear in Jefferson, but he is fairly vividly conjured up in the imagination of "the town," which is "just waiting" this man to arrest Brown for selling moonshine whiskey (46). At the time the novel takes place, Prohibition made it illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the U.S. But Yoknapatawpha is 'dry' throughout its imaginative history, meaning that it was always illegal to sell alcohol there. The federal agents who enforced this law were colloquially called 'revenuers.'

In The Reivers Sam Caldwell's uncle is a "division superintendent" on the railroad line Same works for (130). A typical division superintendent is in charge of a fairly large section of a railroad company's track.

"Dead" before "A Courtship" begins, this man is mentioned as the original owner of the "shotgun" that Herman Basket's aunt threatens to use on her niece's suitors (368).

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in its early history, he does not name the man who is "The Man," the hereditary chief of the tribe. His sister is the mother of Doom. In "Red Leaves," The Man and his son both die shortly after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans - presumably at Doom's hands, but that part of the story is left untold here.

"The U.D.C. ladies" who "instigated and bought" the Confederate statue that stands at the center of Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun are members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of Southern women that was founded in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee (188). Members actively served the 'Lost Cause' of the Old South and the Confederacy by sponsoring the construction of monuments, lobbying boards of education, and so on.

The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).