Character Keys

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.

Physically described as "mountainous" (26) and identified as one of Jefferson's best cooks in Flags in the Dust, Rachel works for Belle and Harry Mitchell, and makes no effort to disguise her preference for Harry over his wife.

The British commander that Charles Stuart Compson fought under in the "Appendix Compson" (326), Banastre Tarleton, was known in England as an outstanding military leader during the Revolutionary War, which he joined at the age of 21. In America, however, Tarleton had a reputation for savagery on the field; he and his men participated in the capture of Charleston, and later became infamous for what Americans called the "Waxhaws Massacre" in South Carolina in 1780.

In Light in August Simon McEachern is more than forty years old when he adopts the five-year-old Joe Christmas from the Memphis orphanage and takes him to the farm where he and his wife live. The narrative describes him as "somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless" (143-44). His voice is that "of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence" (142).

In Light in August Simms may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill.

Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.

In The Mansion Stillwell is the "gambler who had cut the throat of a Vicksburg prostitute" who is an inmate in Parchman Penitentiary at the same time as Mink (107). He is the ringleader of the group of prisoners who try to break out, and the only one who escapes successfully. Subsequently he threatens to kill Mink when Mink is finally released.

The county sheriff in Light in August is named Watt Kennedy. Described as a "fat, comfortable man" (287), "with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face" (420), he investigates the murder of Joanna Burden and pursues Joe Christmas across the countryside (287). Like so many other characters in this novel, he never appears elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson. This youngest of them is definitely the son of a Sheriff Hampton in both the novels in which he appears.

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson. In either case, this is the earliest Hampton, who is is county sheriff in two novels, both set around the turn into the 20th century: The Hamlet and The Reivers.

In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, the top sergeant in the Union troop that arrives at Sartoris is named Harrison. He may be the Yankee who is first spotted by Ringo and Bayard looking at the plantation through field glasses; if so, it is his horse that they kill attempting to shoot him. He was clearly angered by that shooting, which cost the regiment "the best horse in the whole army" (29). Much more hostile to Rosa Millard than his commanding officer, he orders other soldiers to search the house in search of the "little devils" who did the shooting (29).

In "Uncle Willy" Secretary is the name of the "negro boy" whom Willy hires to drive his car (235). In Faulkner's South, even adult black men are often called "boys" by white people, so although the juvenile narrator says that Secretary is "about my size" (235), he also says that Secretary is "older than me" (241) - though we have no way to know how much older. Both the narrator and Willy describe Secretary as "burr-headed," i.e. with short, bristly hair (235).

Other than Colonel John, the only Sartorises referred to in Absalom! are "Sartoris' womenfolks," who use their "silk dresses" to sew the regimental flag that Yoknapatawpha's Confederate volunteers carry to the Civil War (63).

She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes.

In both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Miss Worsham tells Stevens that Mollie "gave [her grandson] my father's name" (261, 358). The narrative tells us that Samuel Worsham left his daughter Belle "the decaying house" she continues to live in (260, 356).

The Samson who appears in The Town is a porter at the Snopes Hotel.

This is not the Indian named "Had-Two-Fathers" who plays a minor role in "Red Leaves." This is the character best known as Sam Fathers, though as he tells Quentin Compson in Faulkner's second Indian story, "A Justice," his Indian name was "Had-Two-Fathers" too (345). In that story he is the child of a Choctaw named Crawfish-ford and an enslaved woman whom Doom, the chief, won gambling on a Mississippi riverboat.

Although the narrator of The Hamlet calls the Varner's cook the "only servant of any sort in the whole district" (11), the Varner's also have a manservant. Among his jobs is carrying Eula "until she was five or six": "the negro man staggering slightly beneath his long, dangling, already indisputably female burden" (106).

Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).

"Saint Francis" - known as Francis of Assisi, the Catholic friar who founded the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century - wrote the words that Quentin Compson remembers on the first page of his section in The Sound and the Fury in the song "The Canticle of the Sun": "All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape."

One of Elnora's three children in the short story "There Was a Queen," Saddie works as Miss Jenny's caretaker, "tending her as though she were a baby" (728). "Saddie" may be a corruption of 'Saturday.' She sleeps in the big house, "on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre's bed" (728). Genealogically, she is Miss Jenny's great-niece, the illegitimate granddaughter of her brother John, though that relationship is not discussed by any of the characters. (In the earlier novel Flags in the Dust, Elnora has only one child - Isom.)

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. In "Tomorrow" Rufus Pruitt is a working-class farmer, a sharecropper's son. He and his mother narrate part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin to solve the mystery of Stonewall Jackson Fentry's behavior.

In Light in August Roz is the grandson of Pappy Thompson; he is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull.

In The Sound and the Fury Roskus is husband to Dilsey and father to Versh, T.P., and Frony. He drives for the Compsons while also caring for the farm animals, although over the years his rheumatism makes that increasingly hard. He is slightly less loyal than his wife to the white family he works for, complaining that there "aint no luck on this place" (29). Dilsey reproaches him for giving their son Versh "them Memphis notions" - that is, presumably, encouraging Versh to leave Yoknapatawpha (31).

In Go Down, Moses Roscius (spelled "Roskus" by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin inherited" and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). He is the husband of Phoebe (spelled "Fibby" in the ledger, 252), and was like her manumitted when Old Carothers died in 1837. According to the ledger, despite being free he "Dont want to leave," and he remains on the plantation until his death four years later (252).

Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first.

In "Knight's Gambit" Robert Markey is "a lawyer" and a man in Memphis "city politics . . . who had been at Heidelberg" with Gavin Stevens and now lives in the city (201). Gavin contacts him for assistance in keeping track of Max Harriss when he goes to Memphis.

Ringo - short for Marengo, the name of Napoleon's horse - was born into slavery as a member of the black family that has served the Sartorises for several generations. He appears in all the stories that Bayard Sartoris narrates, as a major character in the seven that were collected in The Unvanquished and a somewhat reduced one in the later "My Grandmother Millard." Even as a slave he occupies an intimate place in the Sartoris family, as both Bayard's personal servant and his friend.

At the end of The Hamlet among the men watching Flem's wagon heading out from Varner's store toward Jefferson and speculating on what Flem's next move will be is a man who is identified only as Aaron Rideout's brother and also V.K. Ratliff's cousin (403).

Manfred von Richthofen, better known as "The Red Baron," shot down more planes than any other aviator in World War I. Young Bayard tells his grandfather and great-great-aunt that the German pilot who shot down Johnny was a "pupil of Richthofen's" (43).

Reverend Whitfield is the local preacher in Frenchman's Bend, and in four of the fictions set there. His character varies dramatically across those texts. He appears first in As I Lay Dying, in the part of a minister who has had an unconfessed affair with a married woman and is the father of an illegitimate child; many readers are reminded of Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl, not least because Addie Bundren, Whitfield's lover, names her son Jewel.

Reverend Schultz is "the minister" of the Protestant church that both the narrator and title character of "Uncle Willy" attend (227). Along with Mrs. Merridew, he leads the campaign to "cure" Willy of his addictions (232). The narrator, who admires Willy Christian but not the town's 'Christians,' describes Schultz in the Sunday school class for adult men this way: "sitting in the middle of them . . . like he was just a plain man like the rest of them yet kind of bulging out from among the others like he didn't have to move or speak them reminded that he wasn't a plain man" (228).

Res, the farmer at the head of the Grier family, appears very differently in each of the three stories Faulkner wrote about the family during the early 1940s.

The only named one among the three black musicians who accompany Young Bayard, Hub and Mitch on their trip to the neighboring college town to serenade young women in Flags in the Dust, Reno plays the clarinet. He loses his hat when Bayard steps on the gas of his roadster.

Popeye, who is himself impotent, brings Red into Temple's life as a surrogate sexual partner for her - turning Reba's "respectable" brothel, as she indignantly puts it in Sanctuary, "into a peep-show" (255). Red "looked like a college boy" (235), but is part of the Memphis underworld. When Temple tries to run away with Red, however, Popeye kills him. His death is not narrated, but at the raucous funeral service that is held for him in the same speakeasy where he and Temple danced we see the hole Popeye's bullet made in "the center of his forehead" (249).

In The Hamlet Ratliff's father was a tenant farmer who at one time worked on land owned by "old man Anse Holland" next to parcel that Ab Snopes was sharecropping on (29).

According to The Mansion's account of how a Russian fighting for the British as a German mercenary during the Revolutionary War became the founder of the Ratliff family in Yoknapatawpha, the name first belonged to a farm family in Virginia. Some time after Nelly Ratcliffe begins secretly feeding Vladimir Kyrilytch, she "brings him out where her folks could see him" (184). Some time after that, her "ma or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor," noticed that she was pregnant, "and so" Nelly and this first V.K. were married, using her last name (184).

In As I Lay Dying Rachel Samson is the wife of one of the farmers in Frenchman’s Bend. She is upset by the Bundrens' treatment of Addie's body but heaps all her displeasure onto Samson.

Like the enigmatic aunt of (Old) Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, this aunt of Quentin Compson is hard to place on the family tree. She appears only, abruptly, in Absalom, Absalom! when Mr. Compson uses her to explain to his son Quentin something about the nature of women: this aunt - whom apparently neither of these males ever saw - is locked in what Mr. Compson calls one of those "inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities" with "her nearest female kin" (156).

There are a few references to Quentin's great-grandfather in the early fictions about the family. In The Sound and The Fury Mr. Compson mentions him when he gives Quentin his grandfather's watch (76). In "A Justice" Sam Fathers tells Quentin the "your great-grandpappy" bought him and his mother as slaves (344).

Q'Milla sends Strutterbuck a money order for two dollars in The Mansion. Reba and Minnie discuss whether she is "his sister or his daughter" or "his wife" (90-91); according to Minnie, "nobody but his wife" would send him two dollars (91). She lives in Lonoke, Arkansas.

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This Pruitt and his wife appear in "That Will Be Fine." He is President of the Compress Association and a recent arrival in Mottstown.

The dead brother of Luke Provine. According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," it has been "years now" since he, Luke, and another man, Jack Bonds, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64).

In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Compson names "Professor Junkin" as the person at the Jefferson school who called to tell her that her granddaughter Quentin has been truant. He is either Quentin's teacher or the school principal or, since it is a fairly small school, perhaps both.

In The Hamlet Faulkner's imagination takes one of its most amazing flights (or perhaps descents) when he describes Flem Snopes meeting the fallen angels in Hell. Among them is this "pa" of the Prince of Darkness, and so presumably Satan himself - though Faulkner's cosmology is by no means clear (168).

Franklin Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, re-elected to four terms in between 1932 and his death in 1945. He is mentioned in three later texts. In "Two Soldiers" he appears only in Res Grier's reference to "Our President in Washington, D.C." (85). He is included in a list of contemporary political figures in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses - but curiously isn't on the similar list in the earlier magazine version of "Delta Autumn" (322).

One of the four men - the others are Ike, Matthew, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters."

In Light in August Pomp (presumably short for 'Pompey') is Cinthy's husband and the first Gail Hightower's slave. Though called "boy," he is older than his master, and is completely bald (471). He follows his master to war and refuses to believe that he could have been killed in the cavalry raid in Jefferson. Pomp himself is reportedly killed after attacking "a Yankee officer with a shovel" in an attempt to see or perhaps rescue "Marse Gail" (476-77).