Character Keys

During Ty Cobb's career as an outfielder with the Detroit Tigers (1905-1921) he set 90 baseball records. In The Reivers Lucius expects the grandson to whom he is telling the story in 1961 to recognize his name along with Babe Ruth's.

In The Mansion the name "Turpin" comes up in two different chronological contexts. Both are associated with Frenchman's Bend, but this is the earlier of the two, the "Turpin" who is listed among the five local young men who are courting Eula Varner in the early 20th century (133).

Turner Ashby led a cavalry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. The historical event Cass refers to in Go Down, Moses - how "by chance" Turner Ashby lost and the Union army found "Lee's battle-order" for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion of the North in 1862 - is a famous piece of Civil War history; the order itself, Special Order 191, is often referred to as the 'Lost Dispatch' or the 'Lost Order' (272). Ashby himself was killed in combat in 1862.

The children of Frenchman's Bend farmer Vernon Tull and his wife are all girls, but there is no consensus among the fictions about how many daughters they have. In the earliest representation of the Tull family, As I Lay Dying, there are two, named Eula and Kate. In "Spotted Horses" there are three - none named. In The Hamlet, there are four, again not named; though one of these girls is referred to as the "biggest" when all four appear at the Snopes trial, they are described as a unit when they "turn their heads as one head" (357).

Among the suitors for Eula Varner listed in The Mansion are "Tulls" (130). Tulls appear in almost a dozen fictions; most of them are either Vernon Tull or identifiable as members of his immediate family. The Tull or Tulls courting Eula are unlikely to be Vernon, but presumably are somehow related to him.

The jailer in the three novels set in mid-20th century Yoknapatawpha is a man named "Tubbs" in Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun, and "Euphus Tubb" in The Mansion. In the first novel he is described as a "snuffy untidy pot-bellied man with a harried concerned outraged face" (51); although when Lucas Beauchamp is brought into his jail accused of killing a white man, he complains about having to risk his life "protecting a goddamn stinking nigger" "for seventy-five dollars a month," he is nonetheless faithful to his "oath of office" (52).

Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72).

Barefoot, "shambling," with "matted and foul" hair (10) and a "rapt empty gaze" (113), Tommy in Sanctuary helps Lee make bootleg whiskey and, when Lee is not watching, drinks it too. He has been a familiar figure "for fifteen years about the countryside" (113), and occasionally in town, but no one in Yoknapatawpha knows his last name. His behavior disconcerts both Horace and Temple. Lee and Ruby both call him a "feeb" (9, 128). He is feeble-minded but kind-hearted. After Gowan deserts Temple, Tommy loses his life trying to protect her from Popeye.

In Go Down, Moses, Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledgers as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child.

The "Tom" in The Town is a customer at the Sartoris bank who cannot read Colonel Sartoris' handwriting on the loan he is trying to take out (147-148).

The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" describes Tobe as "an old man-servant - a combined gardener and cook" (119), and never refers to him except as "the Negro" or "the Negro man" (120, 122, etc.). The only time we hear his name is when Emily uses it to summon him (121). He appears to have been in her employ since he was "young man" (122), and at least since the time her father died. Earlier drafts of "A Rose for Emily" include an extended conversation between him and Emily. His role in the published version of the story is entirely silent and elusive.

The slave Thucydides/Thucydus only appears in the novel Go Down, Moses by way of the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but the story outlined there is striking. He is the son of Roskus and Fibby and the husband who marries Eunice in the same year she is made pregnant by Old Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owns all four of these slaves. He was born in North Carolina. In his will Old Carothers bequeaths him land, but like Ike McCaslin, Thucydides renounces this inheritance. Instead, according to the ledgers, he chooses "to stay [on the plantation] and work it out" - i.e.

In "Red Leaves" Three Basket is about sixty years old and, like Louis Berry, described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313). He wears "an enameled snuffbox" as an earring (313). Apparently he is a kind of overseer on the Indian plantation. Along with Louis Berry, he spends six days tracking down a Issetibbeha's servant, often remembering Doom's death, which was the last time a runaway slave had to be captured and killed.

Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plots that include much drinking, sex, and humor. According to "Appendix Compson," the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" in Faulkner's Jefferson hide the copies of Smith's books that they borrow from and return to the library "carefully wrapped" inside newspapers (333).

The Sutpens' family cabin in the mountains of Virginia is described in Absalom! as "boiling with children" (179), and the novel never makes it more clear how many siblings Thomas has. At least two sisters are alive and living with him and his father in Virginia when, at 14, he runs away from home (192). But there must have been more: at least, Quentin tells Shreve that, because of the "dampness" and heat in the Tidewater, "sisters and brothers" get sick "after supper and die before the next meal" (184).

Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters: according to the narrative in Absalom!, "one of the sisters" altered their father's hand-me-down clothes to fit the young Thomas (185). This entry is for the "sister" who, during the family's move from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia, gives birth in "a cowshed" to an illegitimate child (183), and gets pregnant again, though "still unmarried" (181), while they are still traveling.

Sutpen's father moves back to coastal Virginia after his wife's death, where he works ("or maybe supposes" to work, 185) on a large Tidewater plantation. He is characterized in Absalom! mainly by his habitual drunkenness, and his "harsh" belief in "his own worth" and "his own physical prowess" (186) - virtues that he seeks to establish by "whupping" a slave from a neighboring plantation (187).

This is one of the Sutpen family's "two older boys" (that is, older than Thomas) who leave the family's home in the mountains "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181).

As the central figure in one of Faulkner's greatest novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen is a very different character, depending on which of the novel's story-tellers is telling his story. On the opening pages, for example, he is a dominant if demonic force that, according to Miss Rosa, is responsible for destroying the culture of the Old South. When he gets to tell his own story, however, as transmitted through three generations of Compsons, he appears as a traumatized small boy who is himself determined if not destroyed by the culture of the Old South.

In both "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, the name of the "special rider" who carries the U.S. mail from Nashville to the Mississippi settlement - Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew - is the source for the name the county seat of Yoknapatawpha. In both texts he is small but stubborn, loyal to the regulations of the federal government but susceptible to the right kind of bribery.

Theron Quick, who appears in The Hamlet as one of the suitors for Eula Varner's hand, could be Lon Quick's son, who appears elsewhere in the novel and has a separate entry in our database. He is among the suitors who ambush McCarron, but ends up being beaten unconscious by Eula, who defends McCarron with her father's buggy whip. He is also one of the two Frenchman's Bend suitors who leave the area "suddenly overnight" once it is discovered that Eula is pregnant - though Ratliff believes both of these young men were "just wishing they had" (140).

In the short story "Lion" Theophilus McCaslin is the grandson of Uncle Ike McCaslin, and a member of the hunting party. (This character never appears in any other story, but later Faulkner uses the name "Theophilus McCaslin" for Ike's father. Those later texts also say that Ike never has any children.)

The man whom Ratliff, facetiously, refers to as "our own Bilbo in Mississippi" in The Mansion was a racist and an outspoken supporter of the Jim Crow system of segregation. He was elected twice as Governor of Mississippi and later three times as a U.S. Senator (179). Two rural white characters in Yoknapatawpha (Bilbo Snopes and Bilbo Gowrie) were named after him.

Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).

Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin.

As Temple Drake, she is the principal character in Sanctuary (1931); as Temple Drake Stevens, she is at the center of the dramatic portions of Requiem for a Nun. She is (as she says frequently in the first novel) the daughter of a judge, a member of an aristocratic family, and a very complex young woman. In the first novel she is a seventeen-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the heir to southern traditions trying on the contemporary role of flapper.

T.P. (Faulkner never explains what the initials stand for) is the second son of Dilsey and Roskus, and like them lives as a servant on the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury. As a young man he takes his brother Versh's place as Benjy's caretaker, and helps his father with the Compsons' horses and cow. In 1910 he gets memorably drunk on the champagne - "sassprilluh," T. P. calls it (37) - that has been bought for Caddy's wedding. In 1928 he no longer lives on the Compson property, but still drives the carriage for Mrs. Compson's Sunday afternoon trips to the cemetery.

This is the second of the two illegitimate Sutpen children that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to before the family reaches the end of their journey in the Tidewater area of Virginia.

At the time the Sutpens begin traveling east in Absalom!, this youngest member of the family "couldn't even walk yet" (180). The novel's sequence of events implies that his mother died giving birth to him or her, and that death precipitated the father's decision to move back to Tidewater - but that isn't made explicit.

Susan Reed is an orphan who is taken care of by the Burchett family in "Hair"; possibly she is their niece or cousin, but the narrator hints that she may be the illegitimate child of either Mr. or Mrs. Burchett. We first encounter her as a "thin little girl," "about five" years old, with "big scared eyes," and "straight, soft hair, not blonde and not brunette" (131). Once she reaches adolescence, however, her innocent look disappears and she becomes promiscuous, with "flimsy off-color clothes" and a "face watchful and bold and discreet all at once" (135).

While drinking moonshine with Young Bayard and Hub in Flags in the Dust, V.K. Suratt tells them about the time Doctor Peabody amputated his "granpappy's laig," using whiskey as the anesthetic (136).

Either Hub's daughter or, less likely, his sister. She does not appear in Flags in the Dust, but Hub tells his wife that Sue will "have to milk" the cow because he is going to town with Bayard and Suratt (138).

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Rafe, Stuart is named after the famous Confederate cavalry general, J.E.B. Stuart. He also appears in As I Lay Dying, but not as Stuart - because Samson cannot remember his first name. Like his brothers, he is a 'tall man': honorable, strong, stoic.

Jackson Fentry is farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," refuses to acquit the Bookwright, who has shot and killed Buck Thorpe for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter. It is discovered that to Fentry, Buck is the son he adopted from a young but dying poor-white woman to whom decades earlier he took in and married just before she died. The son was taken from him at three years of age, to grow up (badly) as a Thorpe, but to him the murdered man is still "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" (100).

In "Hair," the Starneses in Division have "kin" (140) elsewhere in Alabama. The storekeeper and other neighbors in Division wonder if these folks will claim the Starnes house after Mrs. Starnes' death.

This is the younger Spoade, who in The Mansion follows his father's footsteps from South Carolina to Harvard. He is a classmate of Charles Mallison; he invites Charles "to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like" (229). (The Saint Cecilia Society in Charleston is an upper class social club that was originally organized in 1766; its annual balls have been around since 1820.)

Spilmer may or may not still be alive, but the property above the ravine ditch where Mannie Hait hides and shoots a mule bears his name in both "Mule in the Yard" and The Town.

In Go Down, Moses Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She is named Sophonsiba after white mistress of the plantation where Tennie was enslaved. In 1886, at the age of seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike McCaslin finds her and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments. Although Ike attempts to remove her from the squalor of her new life in Arkansas, her priorities are evident in the two words she offers in return: "I'm free" (267).

Sally Wyatt's older sister is named Sophia in Flags in the Dust; she runs the household in which the three elderly Wyatt sisters live "in a capable shrewish fashion" (175).

Since his store is on or near the street in Jefferson that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Nigger Row," it's possible that Sonny Barger is black, but more likely that he is one of Jefferson's white small businessmen who cater to poor people of both races - like Willy in his drugstore (234). The fact that Barger sells the narrator a bottle of "Jamaica ginger" - a legal form of alcohol - suggests a seedy kind of establishment (234).

In The Unvanquished the son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins' was killed in "almost the last battle" of the Civil War, which would have been sometime in 1865 (214). When he died, he was about the same age as Bayard is in "An Odor of Verbena."

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

At his murder trial in "Monk," Bill Terrel tries to blame his son for the crime. This son both denies the charge and "proves an alibi," resulting in his father's conviction (59).

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. This entry is for Solon, who appears in three Yoknapatawpha fictions as one of the farmers in the Bend. He is a major character in the comic "Shingles for the Lord," where he and Res Grier try to out-smart each other in a dog-and-work swapping transaction.

There are more Snopeses in the fictions than any other family. Over 60 named members of the family have their own entries in our database.

The mother of Eck is mentioned in The Hamlet because when Eck's first wife dies, Eck leaves their son, Wallstreet Panic, with his mother to raise, but she plays that role outside the narrative. She is also mentioned in the other two volumes in the Snopes trilogy, again in terms of something that happens outside the narrative, if it happens at all. Because Eck is such a good and generous person, in The Town Gavin Stevens declares that he 'must' be illegitimate, that his mother was committing adultery with someone not named Snopes when he was conceived.

In The Mansion Mink Snopes tells the prison warden that Montgomery Ward Snopes is "my brother's grandson" (99). This is the only reference to Mink's brother in the fictions, and chronologically the possibility that a brother of Mink would have a grandchild Montgomery Ward's age is unlikely. Ratliff asks Montgomery Ward if Mink is his "cousin or uncle" (71); Montgomery refuses to answer, but in his own narrative chapter he refers to Mink as "Uncle Mink" (103).

This is one of the two Snopeses in The Town whose place in the family is impossible to determine. He is mentioned in connection with Ab Snopes' moving into Frenchman's Bend: "another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm" that Ab had been working (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible.

The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules in As I Lay Dying is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," this farmer is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192) - if so, he is Flem's only nephew or niece in the fictions.