Character Keys

Both times Ruby tells how the lawyer she hired got Lee out of prison in Sanctuary, she says he "got a congressman" (59, 278). Neither time does she go into any more details about the congressman.

The congregants in Goodyhay's church in The Mansion are mostly ex-soldiers and their wives or mistresses; one of the men wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been removed" (305), and another refers to the group as "ex-drafted sons of bitches" (300). But the group also includes "the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed" (295) as well as the men who help to build at the two church sites.

In Requiem for a Nun, the ceremony at the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900 includes the firing of a salute and a somewhat diminished version of the famed 'rebel yell' performed by the town's surviving veterans of the Civil War, "old men in the gray and braided coats" of officers - since they have apparently promoted themselves over the passing years (188).

According to the narrator of Light in August, at the end of the Civil War most of the men who fought for the Confederacy "returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead" (474).

In a passage added to "Raid" as a chapter of The Unvanquished, Drusilla tells Ringo about the race between two railroad trains, one driven by Confederates and the other by Union forces, who rushed past Hawkhurst before the track was destroyed by Yankee troops.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. Four different units appear in the short story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." This entry represents the "two soldiers in one of General Forrest's forage wagons" who bring Lucius back to Sartoris (690). As foragers, these men were charged with finding food for the troops in the surrounding countryside - a common practice in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

In addition to the specific Confederate units who appear in the various stories that make up the novel Go Down, Moses is the abstract representation of these men whom Ike McCaslin imagines he sees when he looks at Lucas Beauchamp (who descends from slaves): "the face of a generation," "the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold" (104).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. In Absalom! they appear in several different ways. First, as the idealized "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120).

In "My Grandmother Millard" Forrest tells Granny that he has placed Philip "in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet" (694) - this is that guard.

During the Civil War both North and South used provost marshals as a kind of military police force behind the lines. The "Confederate provost marshals' men" from whom Goodhue Coldfield is hiding in Absalom! would have arrested him as a draft dodger or compelled him to serve in the military (6).

Ab Snopes' Civil War wound was never received in battle, or even from a Yankee, but Faulkner provides several different accounts of the Confederate who shot him while he was stealing a horse and left him with a lifelong limp. In "Barn Burning" that man is identified as "a Confederate provost's man" (5). We are assuming this is the same person who shoots him in two other texts, which provide slightly different versions of Ab's wounding.

In Absalom! this "orderly" tells Henry that "the colonel wants you in his tent" (279). A military 'orderly' is a kind of personal servant to an officer, but the way this one addresses Henry - "Sutpen" (279) - makes it clear that he is white.

In "My Grandmother Millard," four officers "in their gray and braid and sabres" accompany Philip and the chaplain to the wedding at Sartoris (699). This group probably includes some of the five officers who came to Sartoris earlier with Forrest, but that is not directly said or suggested in the text.

In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, McCaslin refers to the men who led the Confederacy in the Civil War as the "group of men . . . inside" the U.S. who "tried to tear the country in two with a war" (269, 322). He calls these men "better men" than "Hitler" and "Pelley" (in the story, 269) or "Hitler," "Roosevelt or Wilkie" (in the novel, 322), but seems glad that "they failed" (269, 322).

In Light in August these military physicians tend soldiers wounded in battle during the Civil War. They are often assisted by Reverend Hightower's father, who learns from them to practice medicine.

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this is the officer in command of the Confederate cavalrymen who warns Granny that she should turn back because "the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols" (24, 56). He apologizes for saying "hell" in her presence, and is chivalrous enough to offer her "an escort" when she insists on going on (24, 56).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this cavalry unit of indeterminate size stops to talk with Granny and her party on "the third night" of their journey toward Memphis (23, 56).

In Light in August this is the troop of Confederate cavalry under the command of General Van Dorn to which Hightower's grandfather belonged. During the Civil War it rode into Jefferson and destroyed a Union supply depot, after which most of them rode away. (This event that Hightower is obsessed with is adapted by Faulkner from an actual raid that occurred in 1862 in Holly Springs, a Mississippi town near Oxford.)

In "Retreat," the Confederate officer in command of the unit that is camped on the outskirts of Jefferson talks with Buck McCaslin about Colonel Sartoris. He recurs in "The Unvanquished," when Bayard remembers this earlier scene, and then repeats these two appearances in The Unvanquished.

The "two or three companions of [Ikkemotubbe's] bachelor youth" who meet him at the "river" upon his return from New Orleans are briefly mentioned by in "The Old People" (202) and again (as "three or four companions") in Go Down, Moses (157-58).

Herbert Head mentions "a little widow over in town" when he is trying to ingratiate himself with Caddy's brother Quentin (110). The "town" is presumably Boston, "over" the river from Harvard. Although it has been suggested that Head is talking about a prostitute, the idea of 'the college widow' as an unmarried woman who dates a succession of students over the years was proverbial in both 1910 (when the conversation takes place) and 1929 (when The Sound and the Fury was published).

These "five different faculty members" at the University of Mississippi are mentioned in The Hamlet as part of Labove's story: one of his jobs while studying there is building fires in their homes each morning (120). (In the novel's very next sentence the narrative mentions "the lectures" that Labove attends later in the day, but by that point the professors have disappeared from the text, 120.)

These are Bayard's teachers at the University of Virginia, and Johnny's at Princeton, who in Flags in the Dust are informed about the kinds of trouble that the twins get into in New York City.

In Light in August these officials and board members of Negro schools and colleges in the South regularly correspond with Joanna Burden, from whom they seek and receive business, financial, and religious advice. Joanna assumes that any of them would admit Joe Christmas to their school on her account.

This is the girl in Sanctuary who told the Dean that Temple was "slipping out at night," in retaliation for the fact that Temple went out "with a boy she liked" (57).

In Sanctuary this is the young man "at school," whom Temple notices in Dumfries when she stops there with Popeye stops in his car. The reader never sees him, but Temple says "he was almost looking right at me!" (140).

In Sanctuary, when Temple thinks of the college baseball game in Starkville that she is missing, she imagines, briefly, "the band, the yawning glitter of the bass horn" (37).

From the little that is said about them in Flags in the Dust, it seems that the law practice that Horace Benbow inherits from his father Will serves mainly if not exclusively the aristocracy of Yoknapatawpha. He meets "conferees" "across pleasant dinner tables or upon golf links or . . . upon tennis courts"; he conserves the will's of "testators" who spend their lives "in black silk and lace caps" (179).

The boys and girls who are Minnie Cooper's "contemporaries" and "schoolmates" begin to ostracize her before they are finished with high school, apparently because her "people," while "comfortable," are "not the best" people (174). They grow up to date and marry each other and have their own families, leaving Minnie on the sidelines of the town's life.

On behalf of the railroad company, this claims adjuster in "Mule in the Yard" pays Mannie Hait the sum of $8500 after her husband gets run over by one of their trains. On this occasion he also thwarts I.O. Snopes, by refusing to pay anything for the mules who were killed in the accident.

Requiem for a Nun notes when the "sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk" (35), the "bailiffs" (36), and the other officials of Jefferson occupy the newly constructed courthouse (35).

In The Reivers the people who live in the vicinity of Ballenbaugh's and seek to close it down include "sheriffs" (who campaign on the promise to run Ballenbaugh and his crew out of Yoknapatawpha), "angry farmers" (who know their livestock is being stolen by that crew), and "ministers and old ladies" (who object to the place on moral grounds, 73). On the other hand, Lucius tells his grandson that "sensible people" from further away were willing to allow the place to exist (74).

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman imagines that he can jump from the porch to the barn "like the pink lady in the circus" (54) - an acrobat he has presumably seen at a show in town in the past.

One of the three people in Sanctuary who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit is "a cigar-clerk" (311). We learn nothing about his testimony, or whether he is sincerely mistaken.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick sees the white people who go to the churches in Jefferson on Sunday morning as "men in their dark suits and women in silks and parasols and girls and young men two and two, flowing and decorous" (41).

This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator of "A Bear Hunt" as "scurrying and screaming" when, some twenty years earlier, the Provine gang would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).

These are the "preachers" and the "Jesus shouters" in "Beyond" whom Mothershed rails against; he blames them for the fact that he found himself in Beyond after committing suicide (786).

The only native American character mentioned in Flags in the Dust, this "Choctaw woman" gave Will Falls' grandmother the recipe for an ointment "nigh a hundred and thutty years ago" (227). That would be around 1790, at which time the Choctaw was one of the major tribes living in the southeastern U.S, including Mississippi. They inhabit Yoknapatawpha in Faulkner's earliest fictions. However, historically the tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha was the Chickasaw, and in his later fictions Faulkner uses that name instead.

In "A Justice" the "boy with a branch" and the "another boy with a branch" have distinct jobs from the rest of the tribe, personally attending to Doom by providing shade and chasing away bugs (354).

This "Chinese laundryman" mentioned in The Town is the only Asian character who appears in Yoknapatawpha. Charles Mallison explains why, although he is not white, this man is in a category that is distinct from the one that the other non-white - i.e. Negro - inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha belong to: "And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even kindless, half the world or anyway half the continent . . . sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule" (321).

The cotton farmer with whom Mink briefly stays in The Mansion has five children between the ages of "five or six and twelve" (438). All five work with their parents picking cotton. Only one is individuated by the narrative: the "oldest girl" (440), who is the "twelve-year-old" and who helps her mother prepare supper (441).

In The Unvanquished these are the children of the "hill man" whom Colonel Sartoris shoots after the War; they live with their mother in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221).

In The Mansion Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children" are sent back to Jefferson and end up wreaking havoc (327). That story is told in detail in The Town, where they are somewhat more clearly individualized: one, probably the oldest, is a girl, two are boys, while no one is sure about the sex of the youngest. (See the entries for Byron Snopes' Daughter, Bryron Snopes' Son(1), Byron Snopes' Son(2) and Byron Snopes' Youngest Child in this index.)

The hands and feet of this child whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" have been scarred by "the other children . . . one day when they were playing" (794). He likes to play with his toy soldiers, one of which is named Pilate, given to him by "an old gentleman who has lived here a long time" (793). A querulous little boy, he seems at the moment mostly "tired of his toys" (793). Like his mother, he evokes the story of Christ, with which the judge has struggled during his adult life.

Nothing definite is said in "Smoke" about the "child" in Battenburg who was run down by the man hired to kill Judge Dunkenfield (31), but based on the fact that narrator doesn't specify race and the aggressive reaction of the people who arrest the driver, this child was presumably white.

According to Charles Mallison in The Town, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.

The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In "A Name for the City" their interactions with the story's white characters they are depicted as friendly. After "ceding" their lands to the newcomers (200), however, they will be 'removed' from the region by the Indian policy of President Jackson's administration - or, as the narrator puts it at the outset of the tale, these "dispossessed people" "emigrated to Oklahoma in the thirties" (202).