Character Keys

During Manfred de Spain's campaign for Mayor in The Mansion, his opponents start a rumor that he got the scar on his face from "a Missouri sergeant with a axe in a crap game" instead of from an enemy soldier while in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (142).

In Flags in the Dust, these are the "white officers" in charge of the African American "labor battalion" that Caspey Strother serves in during World War I (57).

This army officer - referred to as the "exec" in Devries' unit in Korea in "By the People" (134) and as the "second" in Devries' unit on a World War II battlefield in The Mansion (339) - is the executive officer who is second in command of the Negro combat unit that Devries commands. It's likely Faulkner imagined him as 'white': historically, as an officer, he would definitely have been white during World War II, and probably white in the Korean War.

In The Mansion this army nurse, "kin" to a Jefferson family, comes to Jefferson after the end of World War I as the town's "first female hero," having served as a lieutenant on a base hospital in France "within sound of the guns behind Montdidier" (199).

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this officer pins a medal on Devries; in the story it's for his heroism during the Korean War; in the novel, during World War II.

In Light in August, after Hines threatens the congregants in a Negro church with a pistol during a prayer meeting, "the law" comes and arrests him (378). 'Officers' is our way to translate "the law" into the terms of a Character database; presumably Faulkner is thinking of a few policemen or deputy sheriffs.

In Requiem for a Nun the "architect who designed" the Confederate monument that sits at the center of Jefferson is referred to but not described (189).

In the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, this architect lays out both the Compson grounds and the Compson home. He shares the predilections of Faulkner's other architect characters for French furnishings, but there is no direct evidence that (like the architect at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!) he is from France.

The archaeologists mentioned in Go Down, Moses are "a group of white men, including two women," who descend on the Indian mound to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37).

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "Anzac major" sends the drunk ambulance driver back to his unit (527). (Anzac, sometimes written ANZAC, stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army," to which many of the Allied troops fighting around Amiens belonged.)

The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).

In Intruder in the Dust the hills in the Beat Four section of the county remind Chick Mallison that his ancestors came to Yoknapatawpha from Scotland by way of Carolina. If Chick is thinking specifically of his maternal ancestors, these people would belong on the Stevens family tree. But he could instead (or also) be thinking of his Mallison ancestors.

At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115).

What Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" somewhat facetiously calls the "second" "American Expeditionary Force in France" that "began to land in Europe in 1919" are the many Americans who toured or moved to Europe in the years after the First World War (256). The "first" A.E.F., of course, were the one million soldiers in the U.S. Army who landed in France to join the British and French forces fighting Germany; they had returned home by 1919.

In "Shall Not Perish," after Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures.

These soldiers in Sanctuary - presumably cavalrymen like Lee Goodwin - are returning to San Francisco from their deployment in the Philippines when Ruby asks them about what has happened to Lee. When she lets one of them pick her up, he paws her drunkenly while telling her about Lee killing another soldier in a fight over "that nigger woman" (277). American forces were first sent to the Philippines in 1898 to fight the Spanish, but soon were fighting against Philippine nationalists. The Philippines were an American territory from 1898 to 1946.

This man appears in Sanctuary in the story Ruby tells at two different times, to Temple and and then later to Horace, about how when Lee was stationed in the Philippines he "killed another soldier" in a brawl over a local woman (59).

As an American military policeman (A.M.P.), this unnamed character in "Ad Astra" competes with Monaghan for control over the German prisoner. Mystified by the company of headstrong and independent aviators in which he finds himself, he insultingly asserts his authority over the French officer at the Cloche-Clos in Amiens, thus helping to bring on the riot. The French officer calls him a "devil-dog" - a World War I era slang term for a U.S. Marine (422).

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). Because he holds "the equivalent of a commissioned rank," this young man is appointed by Grimm as the "second in command" of the platoon he forms (456). He is the one who, on Grimm's orders, turns on the "fire alarm" after Christmas escapes (458).

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man asks what the sheriff will say about them carrying pistols.

In Light in August, when Grimm asks the "commander of the local Post" about organizing a group to preserve the peace in Jefferson after Christmas is arrested, this man says no. "I couldn't use the Post like that. After all, we are not soldiers now" (452).

The "fellow recruit" in Flags in the Dust who calls Buddy MacCallum "Virge" during their training at a camp in Arkansas; in response Buddy fights him "without anger" for "seven minutes" (355).

In Absalom!, this is the "driver" of the "ambulance" that Rosa takes out to the Sutpen place at the end of 1909, to bring Henry into town "where the doctors could save him" (299).

These are the pilots whom Young Bayard evokes in Flags in the Dust when he talks to Rafe MacCallum "about the war"; the narrator describes them as "young men like fallen angels, and of a meteoric violence like that of fallen angels" (123).

This "somebody" is the pilot in "Ad Astra" who witnessed Sartoris "roosting about five thousand feet above an old Ack.W." - i.e. Sartoris is circling in his plane above a comrade flying a less maneuverable aircraft "for bait" to attract the German aviator who had shot down his brother (414). Ack.W. was military slang for a British World War I plane made by Armstrong Whitworth.

Jefferson is governed by an elected Board of Aldermen as well as a Mayor. This unnamed alderman in The Town is the one who responds to Gavin Stevens' request that the town drain the water tank to find the brass Flem has stolen by saying, "I don’t know how much it will cost to drain that tank, but I for one will be damned - " before Gavin cuts him off (89). (See also Unnamed Board of Aldermen in this index.)

In Sanctuary, when Popeye is jailed in the unnamed Alabama town for murder, this group of men - referred to as "they" but presumably some combination of local policemen and the jailers - talk about how he'll send for his lawyer (310). It is also "they" who take Popeye to the place of his execution, and "adjust the rope" around his neck, "breaking his hair loose" (315).

In the hours before Popeye's execution in Sanctuary, this minister prays for him several times, and repeatedly tries without success to get Popeye to pray for himself.

In "A Rose for Emily," "Miss Emily's relations in Alabama" (126) are "two female cousins" (127) who had fallen out with Emily's father in the past. During Emily and Homer's courtship the town sends for them, but soon discovers that they are "even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been" and is glad when they leave (127).

This judge in Sanctuary makes sure Popeye has a lawyer, denies him bail, and sentences him to be hanged after the jury convicts him.

In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182).

This bailiff appears in only one sentence in Sanctuary, when the judge at Popeye's trial consults with him about getting the accused man a lawyer.

These are the people who live "in houses [and] cabins ten and fifteen miles away" from Lonnie Grinnup's shack (71). According to "Hand Upon the Waters," Lonnie Grinnup and Joe periodically visit them, sometimes "for weeks" - the story simply refers to them as "his hosts" (71). They mostly seem to be farmers, since Lonnie and Joe sometimes sleep in "the hay of lofts," but some of them at least are prosperous enough to have "company rooms" with "beds" to sleep in (71).

The narrator of Requiem for a Nun begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi.

"Sucker" is the generic term Montgomery Ward Snopes uses in The Mansion to refer to the kind of man who falls for Clarence and Virgil's scheme to cash in on Virgil's sexual "powers" (82). The one specific "sucker" who is mentioned during Monty's visit to Memphis is described as "a big operator, a hot sport" (92).

The biological father of Buck Thorpe in "Tomorrow" is an exceptionally illusive figure. Both "Miss Smith" and her brothers, the Thorpes, state that she was married when she arrived in Frenchman's Bend, eight months pregnant. If so, it's never made clear why she leaves her husband. All her "oldest brother" tells Isham Quick is that they "done already attended to" him (106). What he did as her husband, however, or if he was in fact her husband, or what they did to or for him - these questions remain unanswered.

There are various groups of hunters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. These "hunters" are the essentially transcendent community created by the narrator at the start of the chapter called "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In this passage, "hunters" refers not to any specific characters but to an exalted meta-cultural and spiritual category of "men": they are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181).

This is one of the two sets of "half-breed servants" on the Haitian sugar plantation where Sutpen puts down the slave rebellion in Absalom! (199). It represents the "two women servants" (204) who are shut up inside the plantation house during the rebellion (also referred to as "a few frightened half-breed servants," 199). They help load the muskets with which Sutpen and the planter try to defend the house.

When Ratliff tells the story of how Clarence Snopes' political campaign ended ingloriously in "By the People" and again in The Mansion, he invents this man who plays the dirty trick on Snopes to hide himself behind. In the story he calls this "feller" a "low-minded rascal," an "underhanded son of a gun" and a "low-minded scoundrel" (138). In the novel he refers to him as an "anonymous underhanded son-of-a-gun" and an "underhanded feller" (349). In neither text, however, does Ratliff fool his listeners - or, almost certainly, any of Faulkner's readers.

The first of the three different characters whom V.K. Ratliff invents in The Mansion, one of two he refers to simply as "fellers" - i.e. fellows: this "feller" has a whimsical exchange with a racoon who apparently knows him by reputation (57).

Neither of Eck's parents appear directly in The Town, but two of the novel's narrators - Ratliff and Gavin - do discuss his parentage. Based on their contempt for 'Snopeses,' they both feel strongly that since Eck is so good a person, genetically he is "not a Snopes" (32). Thus they invent this "titular father" for him: the imaginary man with whom Eck's mother had an affair (33).

This woman in The Reivers one of Jefferson's more colorful residents, and not just because of her "brassy" (or orange-red) hair (25). Coming "from nowhere" and staying only "briefly," during the 1930s she transforms the "Snopes Hotel" into a place known to "the police" as "Little Chicago" (254). Presumably Lucius' reference to her as a "gentlewoman" is ironic (25): given Chicago's association in the popular mind at that time with the underworld, her boarding house must have been a fairly wild place.

The son Sutpen wants is only one of the two boys at the heart of his "design" in Absalom!. The other is referred to as "the boy-symbol at the door," another poor white child like the boy he himself once was in Tidewater, an "amazed and desperate child" whom he will take inside the front door of his big mansion and so "rive forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were" (210).

"Uncle Willy" is the title character in a 1935 short story. His last name is Christian, his first name is probably William, and as the narrator says, "he wasn't anybody's uncle" (225). His story is briefly recapitulated in two later novels, The Town and The Mansion. His story is very un-Faulknerian in its refusal to provide many details about Willy's past. He was born in Jefferson soon after the end of the Civil War, the son of a man who opened a drugstore in town in the 1850s; Willy himself adds the fact that he "graduated from a university" (245).

Called "Mulberry" as well as "Uncle Pete," Gombault is "a lean clean tobacco-chewing old man" who was enslaved before the Civil War, and became a U.S. "marshal" during Reconstruction (190-91). A salesman of illegal whiskey before, during and after that appointment, as late as 1925 he was still "fire-maker, sweeper, janitor and furnace-attendant to five or six lawyers and doctors and one of the banks" (191-192). He is contemptuous of the various Federal agencies with abbreviated names that came into being in the 1930's, calling them "XYZ and etc. . . ." (190).

Although the soubriquet applied to Uncle Noon Gatewood in The Town labels him according to the demeaning conventions of Jim Crow culture, he is one of the few Negro businessmen who appear in the fictions. He is the "big and yellow" owner of a "blacksmith shop on the edge of town" (68).

The "Uncle Job" in The Sound and the Fury works at the hardware store where Jason Compson also works. In one of his racist rants, Jason calls him "an old doddering nigger" (251), but while Jason also complains about Job's laziness, during the course of the day April 6, 1928, he is shown assembling new cultivators and delivering merchandise. Earl, the man both Job and Jason work for, says "I can depend on him" (248).

"Uncle Dick" is white, so the honorific "Uncle" in his case has a different connotation than it does for the Negro 'uncles' in Yoknapatawpha. In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," and again in The Hamlet, where the story of hidden treasure at the Old Frenchman's place is re-told, he is "a shriveled little old man . . . with a long white beard" (144, 379). He wears "a filthy frock coat," lives in "a mud-daubed hut" in a swamp, and is reputed to eat "frogs and snakes [and] bugs as well" (144, 381).

Uncle Bird is one of the delegation from the Second Baptist Church that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris to recover the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund.