Character Keys

"Indians had owned it" (90) - in The Hamlet this refers specifically to Houston's land, but historically the Chickasaw Indians occupied most of the land in what became northern Mississippi (including the area in which Faulkner locates Yoknapatawpha). Under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson they were "removed" beyond the Mississippi RIver, and most of the tribe was gone from Mississippi by the mid-1830s.

In "A Justice," "the People" is the collective term for Doom's tribal members, and they are differentiated from "the black people" (351, 355). The People as a tribe are also often segregated by gender, as when "all the men sleep in the House" (350), or when on the way to the steamboat, the women walk while the men ride in wagons (351). In this early story the Indians are identified as Choctaws; later Faulkner will consistently refer to the Indians who lived in the land that became Yoknapatawpha as Chickasaws.

In Faulkner's last book, The Reivers, the Chickasaws who once lived in Yoknapatawpha appear only in Lucius Priest's thoughts, as he lays in a bed at Ballenbaugh's and thinks about the history of the land around him, which includes "the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it" (77).

As noted in "Appendix Compson," "Ikkemotubbe's descendants and people" - the tribe of Chickasaw Indians that originally lived in Yoknapatawpha - are "gone" after being 'removed' by the U.S. government (328), but the descendants of the Indians who married Negroes remain, though the "wild blood" on their Indian ancestry appears "only occasionally in the noseshape of a Negro on a cottonwagon" (329).

The people whom Sam Fathers calls "the People" and whom the story's title refers to as "The Old People" are the Chickasaw Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the white settlers arrived in the 1830s. As a tribe they have disappeared from the land, but a cherished part of the narrator's apprenticeship to Sam consists of the stories the old man tells him about this "race," whom neither of them "had ever known" but who survive in the traditions that Sam passes on (204).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp is convicted of and executed for shooting and killing a "Chicago policeman" (259, 356).

In Sanctuary six "liveried chauffeurs" - all presumably employed by a funeral home - drive the otherwise empty "Packard touring cars" that follow the hearse carrying Red's body to the cemetery (249). The odds are good that Faulkner imagined them as Negroes, like the other drivers and chauffeurs in his fictions, but in this text their race is not specified.

In The Mansion Gavin Stevens checks the deed for Meadowfill's property in "the Chancery Clerk's office" - which is the only way this official appears in the novel (367). Typically, a chancery clerk would have been elected to his position. His job would have had him collecting data and presiding over the chancery court records, which would have dealt with disputes adjudicated in the court, centering on land and contracts.

The Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse in Go Down, Moses hears the divorce petition that Roth Edmonds has put forth for Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is described as “quite old” (123).

In The Mansion these two cattle-buyers are brought in as experts to establish the value of the heifer that Mink Snopes wintered in Houston's pasture.

According to The Town, when Major de Spain returns from the Spanish-American War determined to modernize Jefferson, "nothing had happened in [the town] since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another renegade Mississippian" (11). The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South.

In "Shall Not Perish" the narrator recalls, briefly, how Rosa Millard bravely "stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war" (112). Usually, carpetbaggers are associated with the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, while in The Unvanquished Rosa dies before the end of the war.

The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South. Faulkner's carpetbaggers tend toward economic, rather than political, influence in Jefferson. In "Appendix Compson," the demands of this "New England carpetbagger" against the Compson estate prompt Jason to sell off small sections of his land, thus enabling the Snopeses to "encroach" on his holdings (329).

In The Mansion McKinley Smith hires a "professional" carpenter to help him build his house (374).

When in Flags in the Dust Old Bayard finds his ancestor's rapier in the chest of family relics, he thinks of the first Sartoris in the new world, raising tobacco and fighting "his stealthy and simple neighbors" (88). That ancestor lived in Carolina (whether North or more probably South is never specified), and the adjectives "stealthy and simple" make it almost certain that he is thinking about the Indians who were ab-originally on that scene.

The man with whom Caddy's daughter Quentin runs away from home works for the "show" that performs in Jefferson over the Easter weekend. In The Sound and the Fury, he is identified in both Benjy's and Jason's sections by his "red tie" (49, 232). He is only mentioned in the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, as a "pitchman in a travelling streetshow" (330), but this text adds a detail to his biography: when he left with Miss Quentin, he "was already under sentence for bigamy" (342).

In Flags in the Dust this carnival employee is mentioned in Narcissa's account of the time Johnny Sartoris flew over Yoknapatawpha in a balloon. John does that when ptomaine poisoning makes the man to ill to fly the balloon himself.

In "Knight's Gambit" Harriss rents the plantation he inherits from his father-in-law to this "caretaker," a man who "didn’t even live in the county" but commutes from Memphis except during planting and harvest season, when he camps out in one the abandoned Negro cabins (159-60).

The Reivers says little about the "owner of the car" that was the first automobile ever seen in Jefferson, other than that he drove down from Memphis and that he trusts Buffaloe with the car for two weeks (26).

Although "Elly" begins and ends on the road between Jefferson and Mills City, the only other drivers mentioned in the story are referred to, obliquely, at the very end, after the accident, when Elly thinks, "They won't even stop to see if I am hurt" (224). Their presence is indicated only by the "snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel" that she hears on the road above her (223).

In Sartoris' memory of his training as an aviator in "All the Dead Pilots," this man, who seems like a figure in a tall tale, was injured when "a cadet crashed on top of him" during flying practice in Canada (526).

At the "little cafe down by the depot" in Mottstown in Light in August, this "cafe man" serves dinner to Doc and Mrs. Hines and suggests they hire a car to take them to Jefferson rather than wait for the train (359).

In The Sound and the Fury the invisible "caddie" who is called by the golfers while Luster looks for the quarter never specifically appears. In a sense he exists in Benjy's section in name only, whenever the golfers on the course beside the Compson yard call "caddie" (3). The fact that whenever this name is called Benjy instead hears "Caddy" makes this and the book's other "caddies" major characters in his mind.

"Bystanders" is the term the narrator of Light in August uses for the people who watch Percy Grimm lose a fist fight with an "exsoldier" and, despite the veteran's request, refuse to break it up (450). These same people later remember the fight when they see Grimm wearing "his captain's uniform" as a member of the National Guard (451).

In "Centaur in Brass" an unnamed local butcher gives Tom-Tom one of last year's watermelons that has been in cold storage for a year; he is afraid to eat it himself. In giving it to a black man, he joins other white folks in Faulkner's fiction who give black people castoffs with no regard for what happens next.

When Melissa Meek gets there in "Appendix Compson," the bus station in Memphis is filled with "a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions" (337).

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" mentions that "the feller wound the door shut and the bus began to hum" (87). He is referring to the driver of the bus that his brother, Pete, is taking to Jefferson on the first leg of his journey to enlist in the U.S. Army.

"Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" says that Suratt owns "half of a restaurant" in Jefferson (150). The other half is owned by "his brother-in-law" (141) - which is all we know about this man. (The earlier "Centaur in Brass" said even less about this half-owner. In the later novel The Hamlet this brother-in-law is named Aaron Rideout.)

The brother-in-law of Labove's Oxford landlady in The Hamlet gives her sweet potatoes as a treat.

These are the British officers whom Chick refers to in Intruder in the Dust when he reminds his uncle Gavin what he once told him, "about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918" (200).

Sartoris drunkenly tries to work off his resentment toward Spoomer in "All the Dead Pilots" by making this corporal - "who was an ex-professional boxer" - wear a captain's uniform and pretend to be "Cap'm Spoomer" while fighting him with his fists (514).

The "RFC captain" in World War I who, according to Uncle Gavin in The Mansion, was so young and had "such a record" that the British government sent him home before the end of the war so that "he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority" - i.e. the day he turned twenty-one (232). (The Royal Flying Corps was the original name of the RAF, the better-known Royal Air Force.)

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).

This entry represents the boys who appear or are referred to in various passages in The Town. For example, Mink Snopes called out from the jail to passing boys "he could trust would deliver his message" to Flem Snopes (85). "All the boys in town" appreciate Eck Snopes' goodness and the "raw peanuts" he is always willing to share with them (116). "All the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older" enjoy stealing watermelons from Ab Snopes' patch, then watching him rage about the loss (138).

In "Death Drag," these boys are the first to appear at the airfield when the barnstormers land there after having performed a stunt over the town. They are curious about the airplane and the aviators and ask questions that the adults can't or won't. Noticing that "two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves," one asks the "limping man" who turns out to be Ginsfarb, "Were you in the war?" (188). They accompany barnstormers into town, where a boy repeats the question, assuming that the limp is the result of a war injury (192).

This ambiguously defined group represents the "one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes" who "sometimes" visit Lee Goodwin after he's been convicted of murder and on some of those times bring him "baskets," presumably containing food (115).

In The Mansion Charles describes how "the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then" (199) and the "eight- and nine- and ten-year old males" (200) regarded the men returning from in World War I with their "wound- and service-stripes" and "medal ribbons" (200).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin gets in a fight with this boy when he threatened to put a frog in a girl's desk - or possibly the teacher's desk; she is female too. Quentin tells Mr. Compson, though, that "He was as big as me" (67).

The narrator of The Mansion speculates that Meadowfill might have "haggled or browbeat" a young boy for his .22 rifle (370).

In "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140).

In The Hamlet this fourteen-year-old boy has a "habit" of spying on Will Varner's affair with a tenant's wife; he reveals that "Varner would not even remove his hat" during their trysts (157).

In Light in August, this is the friend who upsets Christmas when he tells him and the other boys who hunt and fish together on Saturday afternoons about sexual intercourse, female desire, and menstruation. He also arranges the meeting in the shed with the Negro girl.

In "Death Drag," this boy is afraid to return Mr. Harris' car to him after Ginsfarb skips town without paying for its use in the air show. He seems enterprising enough to take a quarter for returning the car and smart enough to know that Mr. Harris "might get mad" at being cheated (205).

One of the three boys carrying fishing poles whom Quentin encounters in The Sound and the Fury is named "Kenny" (122). This is one of the two who are not; Quentin thinks of them as "the first," "the second" and "the third" (117 etc.) and they can be distinguished from each other. This "second" boy, for example, imagines catching the trout and exchanging it for a "horse and wagon" (117) - Quentin refers to him as "the one that thought the horse and wagon back there at the bridge" (137), and he is consistently the most contrary of the three.

In The Sound and the Fury the bridge over the Charles where Quentin decides to commit suicide is also a place, he learns from the boys he meets there, where "Boston folks" come to fish for the renowned trout who swims under it (119).

This anomalous 'character' does not appear in either the magazine or book versions of "Vendee." But in the typescript for the story Faulkner included a passing reference to the techniques used by "headhunters" in Borneo that Bayard read about and that he and Ringo apparently employ in skinning Grumby after they succeed in killing him (115). In his edition of the story for Uncollected Stories, Joseph Blotner restores this passage to the text, and so the "headhunters" become an entry in our database.

In Sanctuary the man who drives the truck carrying the moonshine that Lee Goodwin makes from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis complains about having to wait for Horace, to whom he is giving a ride to Jefferson. "I got a woman waiting for me," he says (21).

In The Town, to find out "how a bank was run," Flem Snopes watches the men who "kept the books" at work (147).

In Light in August the bookkeeper in the office at the planing mill who tells Hightower that Byron has quit his job there also calls Byron a "hillbilly," which suggests he himself might be from town (413).