Character Keys

"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner.

Philadelphy - almost certainly a corruption of "Philadelphia," the name she has in "My Grandmother Millard" (668) - is, like her husband Loosh, a slave on the Sartoris plantation. She is what is sometimes called a 'house slave,' i.e. one of the slaves who work inside the white family's mansion rather than in the cotton fields. We see her serving as a maid in "My Grandmother Millard," which Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after The Unvanquished was published.

Pettibone is the only one of the characters, black or white, who appear in the Tidewater section of Absalom! who is named, and in his case the name is an adjective rather than a noun: Sutpen's father comes home one night boasting that "we" - he and other poor white men - "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (187). The whole passage suggests that "Pettibone" himself is the owner of a plantation near the one that Sutpen works on.

Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132).

In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation.

The "Paul Rainey" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers was a real Northern millionaire famous for his love of hunting (163). As Lucius notes, he "liked our country enough to use some of [his] Wall Street money" to purchase 11,000 acres of Mississippi land as a hunting preserve (163). Faulkner's father Murry knew him personally.

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits.

The minister of the Methodist Church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury is named Parson Walthall; he protests the slaughter of the town's pigeons to prevent them from fouling the town clock.

In Light in August he is the seventy-year-old deacon of an Negro church in Yoknapatawpha whom Joe Christmas knocks down in the middle of a service.

Georgie, the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls his father "Papa," but his actual name is also George. He is "in the livery-stable business" (268), and has no illusions about the dynamics of his wife's family or the character of its black sheep, his wife's brother Rodney. When his wife's sister Louisa, for example, rationalizes Rodney's promiscuous behavior by pointing to his lack of opportunities "to meet a nice girl and marry her," George says: "Marry? Rodney marry?

"Blind and deaf," with eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, Sanctuary gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place.

Though called "Owl-by-Night" the first time he is mentioned (363), this Chickasaw is more often referred to in "A Courtship" as "Owl-at-Night" (364). He is one of the young men who were interested in Herman Basket's sister - until they realized that Ikkemotubbe wanted her. After that, he willingly helps Ikkemotubbe with his efforts to win the young woman.

In The Town Otis is "nephew or cousin or something" of the Harker who is the engineer at the town's power plant. Although he has "inherited the saw mill" that the older Harker originally ran, Otis fills in at the power plant "whenever Mr. Harker wanted a night off" (26). By the end of the novel he has become Jefferson's "night marshal"; Gavin Stevens calls him one of Yoknapatawpha's "minor clowns" (334).

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (229, 81).

The "old" lawyer Stone (as Eula refers to him in The Town) is likely "the nice" Mr. Stone's father (342).

This particular Snopes is identified in The Town only as the "old maid daughter" of the man (either Flem's father Ab or Flem's unnamed uncle) who lives in a house just close enough to Jefferson to see the town clock (136). Also in the household are two of I.O. Snopes' children, but her relationship to them is not defined at all. She may be Flem's sister, but more likely is another of Flem's many cousins.

The black woman who serves in "Mule in the Yard" and The Town as both partner in and witness to Mannie Hait's ongoing feud against mules and a man named I.O. Snopes remains a kind of enigma. No one in the town knows how old she is: as the story puts it, "she was about seventy probably, though by her own counting . . . she would have to be around a hundred" (249). Even at the younger age, she would have been born into slavery, though that story remains untold.

The Frenchman's Bend planter who appears in The Hamlet is elsewhere identified as Louis Grenier. His family is distinguished by the way it has disappeared completely in the years after the South lost the Civil War: "he was gone now, . . . the Frenchman, with his family" (4). In one scene late in the novel the life of the white ladies and gentlemen on the old plantation is conjured up, but there too the novel notes that "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

Odum Tull appears only once in the fictions, in "Fool About a Horse," when he gives his neighbor Vynie Snopes and her milk separator a ride back home from Jefferson in his wagon. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he is essentially replaced by a farmer named Cliff Odum.)

The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43).

Norman Thomas was a Presbyterian minister by training, one of the country's most famous pacifists during the First World War, and the six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, 1928-1948. According to the character named Dad in The Mansion, the members of Goodyhay's unorthodox congregation "like as not would have voted for Norman Thomas even ahead of [Franklin] Roosevelt" (300).

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt.

Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives).

In Light in August the first Nathaniel Burrington stands at the head of the ancestral line that reaches an end with Joanna Burden. He is a Unitarian minister in New England who fathers ten children, the youngest of whom is Calvin, who changes his last name from Burrington to Burden.

Historically, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave dealer before the Civil War, one of the Confederacy's most successful cavalry officers during the war, and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. Although the KKK appears in several fictions (for example, Absalom! and The Mansion), none of the eleven fictions that mention Forrest connect him with it, or make any reference to his actions after the war.

In The Sound and the Fury Natalie is a girl about Quentin and Caddy's age who lives near their house. Caddy calls her "a dirty girl" (134) after catching her and Quentin naively exploring their sexualities together in the barn, but their behavior would probably seem natural enough to anyone but Quentin. Natalie does, however, take the lead in this exploration, and given the contemptuous way Caddy treats her (calling her "Cowface," for example, 136), the novel might be suggesting she is lower class.

Narcissa is born into one of Yoknapatawpha's leading families and marries into another. She plays a major role in three early fictions, which together even form a kind of asymmetrical trilogy. In Flags in the Dust she is the most eligible young woman in Jefferson before she becomes Mrs. Bayard Sartoris. In that novel her role is essentially passive, as she is courted or stalked by men from three very different classes; by the end of it she is a young widow with a newborn son, whom she names Benbow Sartoris.

As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed.

The Myrtle in The Sound and the Fury is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece. (Chronologically it's possible that this is the same Myrtle who, younger, worked as a receptionist in Flags in the Dust, but the novel provides no evidence for that connection.)

Myra Allanovna in The Mansion is the Russian immigrant proprietor of an upscale New York store where she sells the neckties she designs. She is described by Ratliff as "a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn't a fitted nobody," but he adds that she has "the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they popped a little" (186). (Faulkner almost certainly bases this character on Lucilla Mara de Vescovi, an Italian immigrant who opened Countess Mara, a men's neckwear company, in New York in the early 1930s; Countess Mara ties are still sold today.)

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts.

Mrs. Starnes, mother of Sophie Starnes, becomes widowed after Will Starnes dies. He leaves her with a mortgage on the house in Division that Stribling (Hawkshaw) promises to pay off. Although the narrator refers the Starnes as "backwoods folks" (139), Mrs. Starnes believes her family's status is nonetheless superior to Stribling's (she calls him "one of these parveynoos" [140], i.e. parvenus). When she dies, Hawkshaw buys her headstone.

In The Town Mrs. Widrington owns a "a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that probably didn't even know it was a dog" (380). When the animal disappears, Mrs. Widrington runs ads "in all the Memphis and north Mississippi and west Tennessee and east Arkansas papers" and agitates the local lawmen - Hub Hampton and Buck Connors - to look for it.

Although the wife of Wallstreet Panic Snopes is never named in The Town, she is memorably characterized. When she first appears at school in Jefferson, the teacher, Miss Vaiden Wyott, instructs Wall that "this is she. Marry her." He does. His wife is described as a "tense fierce not quite plain-faced girl . . . and a will if anything even more furious" than Gavin's in opposing the rest of the Snopeses (154).

In Flags in the Dust Virginius MacCallum has two wives. Both have died before the novel takes place. The first of them was clearly a country girl of humble origins: her dowry consisted of a clock and "a dressed hog" (332). The novel does not mention anything else about her, but what it says later about the second wife - Buddy's mother, from whom he gets his coloring - suggests this wife was the mother of Virginius' five other sons: unlike Buddy, for instance, they all have "brown eyes and black hair" (354).

In "That Will Be Fine," Mrs. Tucker is one of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquests, the married woman with whom he had an affair while visiting town "last summer" (266). One one occasion, Mrs. Tucker is "sick," so Georgie doesn't get a quarter for his part in the "business" (285).

When Trumbull moves away from Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet, "his wife" goes with him (72).

In "Shall Not Perish," the wife of Solon Quick lives with him on a farm in Frenchman's Bend. She also rides to Jefferson in the bus that he drives, paying the same fare as all the other riders. The money she uses is "egg-money," that is, money she makes from selling the eggs that her chickens lay (111).

Chick speculates in Intruder in the Dust that the wife of Constable Skipworth probably served supper to Lucas during the time he was in her house.

In The Town this woman is the wife of the highway engineer who moves to Jefferson, where they discover that their second grade son has polio.

The "Mrs. Compson" who appears in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished is a hard character to identify. Throughout the other four Unvanquished stories that mention "Mrs. Compson" it seems clear that she is married to General (Quentin) Compson, who is off fighting the Civil War until the final story, "Odor of Verbena," when he makes a brief appearance (245). But in "Skirmish at Sartoris," readers are told that the "only husband [Mrs.

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 Mrs. Pruitt is the wife of the President of the Compress Association in Mottstown is having an affair with the uncle of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine."

According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," Mrs. Luke Provine receives no financial support from her ne'er-do-well husband. It seems that she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64).

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons live next door to the Compsons. Maury Bascomb has an affair with Mrs. Patterson when the Compson children are young. At least once Caddy takes her a letter from "Uncle Maury," and sometime later Benjy tries to deliver another. On that occasion we hear Mrs. Patterson call Benjy "you idiot" as she tries to grab the letter before her husband can reach him (13).

In The Hamlet Odom Bookwright mentions but does not name his wife when he tells Ratliff that she hasn't spoken of "anybody's new sewing machine in almost a year" (76).

Mrs. Nunnery is the mother in The Town who enlists Eck Snopes' help when her son Cedric goes missing. She is so frantic that she doesn't even hear the explosion in which Eck blows himself up during the search; "finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming" (115).

Mrs. Merridew is the character whom the juvenile narrator of "Uncle Willy" casts as the story's main antagonist: when he accuses Job of telephoning "Her" about Willy's whereabouts, both he and Job know he means Mrs. Merridew (246). She is a member of Reverend Schultz's church and the determined leader of the crusade to "save" Uncle Willy from his predilections, which she sees as both beastly and sinful (238).

In Light in August McKinley Grove's wife is described as "labor- and childridden," spending "almost half of every year either pregant or "recovering" (5), so it is not surprising that she discovers her sister-in-law Lena's pregnancy and tells McKinley about it.

Joe Christmas' foster-mother in Light in August, Mrs. McEachern, is a small, timid woman, a "patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation," who looks fifteen years older than her husband and who has been hammered "into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes" (147, 165). She tries without success or acknowledgement to provide what she thinks Joe wants and needs.