Character Keys

In "Appendix Compson" the owner of the boardinghouse that used to be the Compson family home is a "countryman," which in this context refers to a rural person as opposed to someone from town (331).

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the people who board with Popeye's mother "clients" (304). None are described in any detail, but we know they include some "old ones" and one man who finds two fires in his room. The day after firemen discover Popeye's grandmother with a fire in the attic, "all the clients left" (305).

The men who stay at the Beard boarding house are mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Light in August. The first novel describes them as traveling salesmen, jurors from out of town, weather-stranded countrymen, even two "town young bloods" who keep a room as a place for gambling. Besides Byron Snopes, some - bachelors identified as "clerks, mechanics and such" - live there more permanently (104).

In the "Appendix" these are the unnamed boarders - "juries and horse- and muletraders" - who live in the Compson house after it has been vacated by the Compsons (331) .

When in The Mansion Linda Snopes Kohl takes her campaign to improve black schools to "the County Board of Supervisors," they try at first to talk her out of the idea (250); when she persists, they "didn't dare unlock their door while they were in session" and resort to having their lunch snuck in "through the back window" of the meeting room (251).

This icon represents the "next generation" of town authorities" in "A Rose for Emily" (120) who lead Jefferson in the early 20th century with their "more modern ideas"; this group includes the "deputation" of Alderman who pay a call on Emily Grierson to tell her that there is no record that her taxes had ever been remitted (120). Their unnamed spokesman is polite but firm, though his courteousness is soundly defeated by her intransigence - and the unwritten chivalric rules that still govern relations between men and ladies.

These aldermen are elected officials who (along with the town mayor) govern Jefferson. In The Town, the board of aldermen meets to consider Gavin Stevens' complaint against Mayor de Spain. (See also Unnamed Alderman in this index.)

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this "plump blonde woman" and "a man" get out of a taxi (192). The couple's behavior outside the door causes Fonzo to suck in his breath, and Virgil to assume that they must be married, but while the narrator never says so explicitly, it's clear enough that she is a prostitute and he is one of her customers. She disappears into the house.

In Flags in the Dust this man sits in front of Rogers' restaurant, "a man of at least forty" who is wearing a motley collection of uniforms and playing a guitar and harmonica (which the narrative calls a "mouthorgan," 118). The narrative describes what he plays as "a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythymic as a mathematical formula but without music" (118). The tin cup at his feet contains "a dime and three pennies" (118).

This is "the officer" in Sanctuary who brings Popeye from Birmingham, where he is arrested, to the "small Alabama town" where he will be tried and convicted (310).

The woman in Go Down, Moses whom Lucas calls a "yellow slut" - that is, she is light-skinned and promiscuous - was (perhaps unofficially) married to and (certainly unofficially) divorced from Oscar, one of the workers on the McCaslin plantation; she came to Jefferson from Memphis, and returned there after Roth Edmonds "voced" them, as Lucas puts it (115).

She is the mistress of a federal official in Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction, a connection that leads to her brother’s installation as a marshal in Jefferson. She is described in Go Down, Moses as "half-white" (277).

In The Town Ratliff reports that Will Varner had three "mulatto concubines" - the "first Negroes" in Frenchman's Bend, "and for a time the only ones [Varner] would permit there" (289).

In The Mansion the "barbers" at the Memphis "barbers' college" that Virgil and Fonzo attend seem to talk about sex a lot (81).

In "Knight's Gambit," the Jefferson barber who joins the conversation about Gualdres' blind horse is "a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly" (178).

The town barber in Sanctuary listens silently while Clarence Snopes complains about the "Memphis jew lawyer" who wouldn't pay full price for the information he was trying to sell, then slyly lets Clarence know how little of his story he accepts at face value (266). His open-mindedness identifies this barber with Henry Hawkshaw, the man who owns the Jefferson barber shop in Faulkner's short story "Dry September," published a month before Sanctuary appeared - but the barber in the novel is not named.

One of the two other barbers in Hawkshaw's shop in "Dry September"; he asks, "You reckon [Will Mayes] really done it to her?" (173).

In The Mansion the Baptist minister marries Essie Meadowfill and McKinley Smith (after "washing his hands and putting on his coat and tie," 383), and later performs his "glib and rapid office" when officiates at Flem's funeral (462).

According to the account in Requiem for a Nun, this minister offers a prayer as part of the ceremony commissioning Sartoris' regiment at the beginning of the Civil War.

Although Emily herself is an Episcopalian, this Baptist minister is "forced" by the "ladies" of Jefferson to pay her a pastoral visit rebuking her and Homer's public behavior; he "never divulges" what happened in when he confronted Emily, but he "refuses to go back" to her house again (126).

An unnamed banquet guest in The Hamlet, a "fellow neophyte" in the legal profession, invites Labove to Memphis to celebrate their achievement in graduating from law school (130).

According to Charles in The Town, the people who own stock in the Sartoris bank include some of the most prestigious families in Yoknapatawpha - besides Sartorises, he mentions Major de Spain, Will Varner, "the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham" as well as the Stevenses - and also "a hundred others that were farmers around in the county" (124).

In Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin meets with this man in the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time. He is describe as a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like Ike's father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War (267).

The narrator of The Mansion speculates at Flem's funeral that most bankers who die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound have just been visited by a State or Federal - or "maybe both" - bank inspector (461).

These are the bank "clients coming and going to leave their money or draw it out" that Flem watches in The Town (146). In class they range from the old county families with "ponderable deposits" in the bank (293) to "one-gallused share-croppers" whose typical net worth is a single bale of cotton (291).

In "Mule in the Yard" and again in The Town, the "teller" at the bank hands Mannie Hait her money when she cashes out her insurance settlement (253, 244). (There is also a "cashier" on hand at the time, so we create two characters - though usually the terms "teller" and "cashier" are synonymous.)

In The Mansion, the presence in the Snopes bank of this "professional cashier" - "imported from Memphis" - is a sign of post-World War II progress, the "industrial renascence and rejuvenation" that has reached "even rural Mississippi banks" (400).

In Light in August, this cashier brings the sheriff the envelope that Joanna Burden deposited at the bank, addressed by her "To to be opened at my death" (294).

When The Town retells the story of Byron Snopes' robbery at the Sartoris bank, it adds these two auditors to the account; they quickly discover the crime.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, this bandit is part of the gang that is brought to the settlement; he claims that the sergeant who commanded the militia unit that captured him was "a former follower of his, the bandit's, trade" (5, 201).

The "band [that] plays Dixie" which Shreve imagines in Absalom! is part of a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262).

In The Sound and the Fury this woman waits on Quentin in the bakery shop. According to Quentin, she looks "like a librarian" (125). She is very hostile to "them foreigners" in her neighborhood, and suspects that the little girl in her store may be shoplifting: "She'll hide it under her dress and a body'd never know it" (126).

In The Town this bailiff "hollers 'Order! Order in the court!'" at Mink Snopes' murder trial when Mink calls for Flem instead of paying attention to the proceedings (86).

The 'bailiff' who appears in Intruder in the Dust is a product of Chick Mallison's imagination, as he fantasizes about how the character of the white population of Beat Four might be put on trial.

In The Hamlet this bailiff tries to serve Flem his papers for a court appearance and is baffled when Flem refuses to acknowledge the suit against him (355).

This "bad man" is the antagonist of the story - a kind of grim fairy tale - that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). The question of the racial identity of this man, and the "queen" who also appears in Nancy's unfinished story, is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black.

This is the youngest child of Uncle Fred and Aunt Louisa. Georgie's narrative in "That Will Be Fine" does provide either its name or its gender.

In "Lion" Quentin invokes the mystical powers of nameless Aztec chiefs in pre-Columbian Mexico (who were looked upon as being "both more and less than men," 186) to show how Lion ruled the other dogs in the hunting camp.

Invented by Gavin Stevens in "A Name for the City," this aviator aspires to be the latest individual to set a new speed record for traveling around the world. Stevens gives him elementary emotions and diction, suggesting that a lack of respect for such an individual.

According to Boon, the Memphis man who sold Grandfather the car in The Reivers said to run the engine every day.

The "man" in The Mansion from whom Flem buys his automobile - he's either a salesman or a dealer - tells Flem he has to drive his car at least once a month to "keep the battery up" (172).

The first time Ike refers to the Bible in Go Down, Moses, he talks about it as the word of God: "He told in the Book," etc. (243). But when Cass challenges him on the subject of race in the Bible, repeating the familiar pro-slavery argument that the enslaved Africans were the accursed "sons of Ham" (246), Ike introduces the idea of "the men who wrote His Book for Him" (246), i.e. the human authors who "transcribed His Words," and often misquoted Him, or misrepresented His will, despite their desire to "write down the heart's truth" (247).

He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust by Monaghan, who says that during the Great War Young Bayard "knocked two teeth" out of this "Australian captain" in a fight over a girl in a "London joint" (385). This officer's role closely resembles that of the unnamed Australian officer Bayard tells Rafe MacCallum about much earlier in the novel, but that officer was a major, and the nightclub was in Leicester.

The aunt of Temple who lives "up north" in Sanctuary may really exist, though it is clear that when the local newspaper in Jackson publishes the news that Temple's father has sent his daughter to spend time with this woman, that is a fiction intended to cover Temple's disappearance from college (176).

This deeply devout and caring woman is a constant presence both in Rider's life and the story "Pantaloon in Black" in both its publications, as a short story and as a chapter in Go Down, Moses: "She was his aunt. She had raised him. He could not remember his parents at all" (238, 130). Several other characters, including her husband and members of Rider's mill gang, are referred to as her messengers, as she makes repeated efforts to rein in Rider's self-destructive bent by encouraging him to turn to family and to religion.

In "Spotted Horses," Mrs. Tull's aunt is one of the Tull women in the wagon when the runaway pony overruns it.

The unnamed aunt whom Herman Basket and his sister live with in "A Courtship" seems to be their surrogate parent; the other Chickasaw often hear her voice when it is raised to scold her niece's laziness. She is also actively involved in her niece's courtship. It is to ingratiate himself and his cause with her that Ikkemotubbe sends a pony and his gamecocks as gifts, and when the suitors won't behave she does not hesitate to threaten them with a shotgun. She feels that her family is superior to "Issetibbeha's whole family" (365).

In the three texts that tell the story of Flem Snopes' attempted embezzlement - "Centaur in Brass," The Town and The Mansion - these are the accountants employed by the state, or perhaps the company that bonds local officials, to audit the books at the Jefferson power plant. The third text revises the account to add that their figures are incorrect.

This very peripheral character is mentioned in Flags in the Dust in one of Monaghan's anecdotes about his experiences with Bayard Sartoris in World War I as the "A.P.M." whose whistle Comyn took and used to start a melee in an Amiens night club called the Cloche-Clos (387). The Provost Marshals ran the army's military police.