Character Keys

Mr. Ballott is "the white stable foreman" at the Priest livery stable in The Reivers (7). He runs the business and keeps track of the black employees during the day. The novel's reference to his "first wife" makes it clear that he has been married at least twice (8).

In The Town Adams is the Jefferson mayor who precedes Manfred de Spain in the office: "the mayor with a long patriarchal white beard, who probably seemed to young people like Cousin Gowan older than God Himself, until he might actually have been the first man" (11).

In the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, the mother of Quentin MacLachan Compson I apparently dies early in his life. He is an "orphan" who is raised by her family in "the Perth highlands" (326).

Moseley is the Mottson pharmacist who lectures Dewey Dell when she comes to his drug store seeking an abortion. He narrates one chapter in the novel and tells us that he is "a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years" (202).

Montgomery Ward was named for a national retailer (Montgomery Ward) that specialized in selling by mail to rural customers. The son of I.O. and his first wife, he is among the first Snopeses Faulkner ever created. He doesn't appear in Flags in the Dust but is mentioned there when Horace Benbow's neighbor asks him about "your Snopes" (166). After faking a heart condition to evade the draft, Monty had accompanied Horace Benbow to World War I as a non-combatant working with the Y.M.C.A.

This is one of Faulkner's characters who are defined by absence and indeterminacy. In "Ad Astra," when the aviator Monaghan explains his "Shanty Irish" origins, he gives a memorable description of his father, but he cannot trace his ancestry before that: other than saying his father came "out of a peat bog," which suggests the Irish peasantry, Monaghan claims, "I don’t know what my grandfather was. I don’t know if I had one. My father don’t remember one. Likely it could have been one of several" (415).

The wife of Lucas Beauchamp figures in five different texts. In the first two ("A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always") she is unnamed. In the first one she speaks a thick, essentially mistrelish dialect ("Yawl and your Gawge Wilkins!" 223), in the second she is only mentioned, once.

In the first five texts that mention this character, she is referred to as either "The Man's|Issetibbeha's sister" or "Ikkemotubbe's|Doom's mother." She is a member of the family of chiefs in the tribe of Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers began arriving, but Faulkner defines the tribe (variously called Choctaw or Chickasaw) as patriarchal, and so as a woman neither she nor her son is in the direct line of succession.

In "Hair" Mitch Ewing is one of the narrator's sources of information about Hawkshaw. Because of his job at the railroad station, Ewing knows that Hawkshaw buys a ticket every year to a "junction-point," a station from which "he can go to Memphis or Birmingham or New Orleans" (143). (He may be the same character as the young man named "Mitch" who drinks with Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust.)

"Mister Joe Butler" is one of the two characters whom Byron Snopes invents in Flags in the Dust in his attempt to deceive Virgil Beard about the nature of the anonymous letters he is sending Narcissa (108). He is supposed to live in St. Louis.

In The Unvanquished - in a passage added to the original story "Raid" - Ringo sleeps in "Missy Lena's cabin" at Hawkhurst; she is undoubtedly a slave on the plantation, but does not appear in the novel herself (99). If her name was given her by the whites who owned her, as was probably the case, Missy Lena is likely a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; in Faulkner's fiction as in southern history, slave names were often a mock-heroic version of classical ones.

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott is the second grade teacher who encourages and advises Wallstreet Panic Snopes throughout his public school education and beyond. She is a descendant of an old Yoknapatawpha family, but after teaching in Jefferson for a decade she decides "to accept a position in a school in Bristol, Virginia" (154). It would seem likely that she and the Doctor Wyott who runs the Academy that his grandfather founded must be related. Both these descendants of generations in Yoknapatawpha share a common interest in eduction.

Miss Lorraine is one of the two women in Sanctuary who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after Red's funeral. (The context suggests they might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) Lorraine is the "thin woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses" (250). The narrator refers to her "flat spinster's breast" (256) and several times compares her appearance to that of "a school-teacher" (251, 258).

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Laura is Quentin's elementary school teacher. She disconcerts Quentin when she asks him "who discovered the Mississippi River" (88), but she may also be the teacher Quentin refers to in Benjy's section, when he tells his father about trying to protect her from a boy who "said he would put a frog in her desk" (68).

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Holmes is one of two young women on a pleasure outing with Mrs. Bland, Gerald, Spoade and Shreve when Quentin is arrested for kidnapping the unnamed Italian girl. Quentin notes that she and Miss Daingerfield, the other young woman, have "little white noses" (145) and look at him "through veils, with a kind of delicate horror" (141).

Despite her title, "Miss Elma" in The Town is the widow of the previous county sheriff who now works as the "office deputy" for Sheriff Hub Hampton (183).

A major character in The Reivers. "Miss Corrie," as she is called when Lucius first meets her (99) - or "Everbe," as he calls her after learning later in the narrative that her given names are "Everbe Corinthia" (153) - was born in Kiblett, Arkansas. After her mother's death, her foster-mother put her to work as a prostitute "as soon as she was big enough" (154). She is, Lucius notes when he first meets her at Miss Reba's, "a big girl," "still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain" (99).

In Light in August, Miss Carruthers was the organist in Hightower's church when he preached there, but has now "been dead for almost twenty years" (366).

In The Reivers Ballenbaugh's is currently owned by the "only child" of the second Ballenbaugh, a "fifty-year-old maiden" (74). She is described as a "prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman" who makes her living farming the land, and "running a small store" that has a loft which accommodates overnight guests (74). She may be "fleshless," but the food on "the table Miss Ballenbaugh sets" is well known for the pleasure it provides (74).

In The Mansion Miss Allison is the spinster daughter of Old Major de Spain's sister and "the retired principal of a suburban Los Angeles grammar school" (463). She is deeded the old De Spain mansion - 'the mansion' of the novel's title - by Linda Snopes Kohl.

Minnie Cooper, the central character in "Dry September," is a Jefferson woman, "thirty-eight or thirty-nine" years of age (173); although the story is vague on this point, it is apparently her accusation of assault against Will Mayes the precipitates the lynching. She is described as "still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress" (174). Never married, she lives with her mother and aunt, and has received local derision for her romantic travails and, more recently, her drinking.

In The Mansion Mink Snopes describes "the lady that raised me" as "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).

The brief description of Mink's father in The Hamlet could make him seem sympathetic: he's a lifelong sharecropper who "moved from farm to farm, without himself having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them" (261).

In The Hamlet Mink and his wife have two "towheaded" daughters (81), born two years apart (264). This is the older one, though the novel does not distinguish between them when it depicts them, for example, hiding behind their mother's "skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world" (82). They were conceived two years apart, in the first five years of their parents' marriage (264). In The Mansion, the "two daughters" are mentioned, briefly; this older one disappears after her father goes to prison and her mother dies (10).

In The Sound and the Fury Mink works at the livery stable in Jefferson. Based on characters with similar jobs in the other fictions, he is most likely black, but that is not specified. He drives the hack, the rented carriage, that the Compsons rent for Mr. Compson's funeral, and then, in exchange for a couple of cigars, drives it again so that Jason can show Caddy's child to her.

Milly Jones appears in both "Wash" and Absalom! as the poor white and illegitimate grandaughter of Wash, who is described in the novel's "Genealogy" as a "hanger-on of Sutpen" (308). She is "eight-years-old" when first mentioned in the short story, and an "infant" when first mentioned in the novel (536, 99). In both texts she is "a fifteen-year-old gal," as Wash puts it in the story, when Sutpen begins a kind of courtship of her, and "already mature [i.e. sexually], after the early way of her kind" (541).

First mentioned but not named by Will Falls in Flags in the Dust when he mentions that Bayard's two sisters went to stay with his "gran'pappy" in Memphis during the Civil War (20), he comes into a little more focus in "My Grandmother Millard" when Bayard notes that his grandmother's dead husband owned a "supply house" in Memphis (688). One of his customers was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who (although the story never mentions it) was a well-known Memphis planter and slave-dealer at that time.

Mike is presumably the owner of the Boston gym where Gerald Bland has been learning to box. In The Sound and the Fury Shreve tells Spoade that Bland has "been going to Mike's every day, over in town" (166).

First described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as a "young light negress" (27), Meloney is later referred to by Jenny Du Pre as a "mulatto girl" (394). She is Belle Mitchell's servant when the novel begins, but soon goes into business for herself as a beautician with the money that Simon embezzles from the Second Baptist Church. At the end of the novel Simon is found murdered in her cabin.

Melissa Hogganbeck is a history teacher at the Jefferson Academy that Charles Mallison attends in "Knight's Gambit." Her "tireless cultured educated 'lady's' voice" makes it hard for him to endure the class which she "now called World Affairs with capitals on both” (209). She also teaches American History before 1865 at "the Academy" to Linda Snopes in The Town (301). If either she or her grandfather, who is also mentioned in the novel, are related to Boon Hogganbeck, who appears in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, the texts give no hint of it.

The young black who rides Acheron against Lucius and Lightning in The Reivers is named McWillie. According to Lucius, "for size and age and color [he] might have been Lycurgus' twin" (220).

In Light in August McKinley Grove brings his twelve-year-old sister Lena to live with his family in Doane's Mill, Alabama, after the death of their parents. He is "just forty" years old and "twenty years her senior" (5), which gives him a birth date in 1892. "He was a hard man": when his wife tells him that Lena is pregnant, he "calls her whore," (6), after which Lena leaves Doane's Mill in search of her baby's father.

Hoake McCarron's father makes a dashing figure in The Hamlet: a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman.

In "Pantaloon in Black" the country sheriff who arrests Rider is named Mayfield; in Go Down, Moses, his name is changed to Maydew; when Rider's story is retold by Temple in Requiem for a Nun the sheriff is not named. In the first two texts, only his name is changed. In both he tells Rider that "You'll have plenty of fresh air when [the Birdsongs] get ahold of you" (254, 150).

In "Knight's Gambit," the one text in which he has a significant presence, Max Harriss is the twenty-one-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss (nee Melisandre Backus). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192). As a son he takes after his gangster father; in a sense, the eyes have it: despite his "delicate face," there is "nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). Max is the older of "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148).

The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).

In The Sound and the Fury Maury Bascomb is the brother of Caroline Bascomb Compson. For much of the Compson children's early life he lives in their home and regularly partakes of their father's whiskey; by 1928 he has moved away, but continues regularly to ask his sister for money. Benjy was originally named "Maury" in his honor. He also has an affair with the Compsons' next door neighbor, Mrs. Patterson. When the affair is revealed, Mr. Patterson beats Uncle Maury - or as Benjy puts it, "His eye was sick, and his mouth" (43).

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

The narrator of "Hair" says Matt Fox, a barber at Maxey's barber shop, "knew more about Hawkshaw than Maxey" (133), which surprises the narrator because Matt does not talk much. Matt is also married and described as a "fat, flabby fellow, with a pasty face and eyes that looked tired or sad something" (133). He is "funny" and "almost as good a barber as Hawkshaw" (133).

Led by Samuel Ross Mason, a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, "Mason's ruffians" were a gang of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in the Mississippi Valley frontier in the late 18th century. Both the first-person narrator of "A Name for the City" and the omniscient third-person narrator of Requiem for a Nun reject the idea that the unnamed bandits who were briefly held in the settlement jail were part of this gang, because - as Requiem puts it - "even the last of Mason's ruffians were dead or scattered by this time" (5).

The biblical mother of Jesus is mentioned in two fictions. In The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog mentions Mary in his Easter sermon, emphasizing her sufferings as a mother, "de pangs" of childbirth, her "weeping en lamentation" as she fears for the life of her newborn child and her grief at the scene of the crucifixion (296).

Martha is the wife of Louis Hatcher in The Sound and the Fury. He tells Quentin that his wife was afraid the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania could reach Mississippi.

Maw Grier's brother Marsh fought and was wounded in World War I. For Mrs. Grier in "Two Soldiers," her brother's decision to enlist in 1917 gives her a way to appreciate why in 1941 her oldest son Pete has "got to go" to the another war. For Mr. Grier, however, Marsh's "actual wound on the battlefields of France" means the family has already contributed "enough" to U.S. war efforts (85). Mrs. Grier mentions her brother again in "Shall Not Perish."

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Mannie has been married to Rider for half a year when her sudden death (of unspecified causes) becomes the traumatic loss, the powerful absence, that generates the story. She is described as having a "narrow back" and "narrow" hand (241, 133). Rider indicates that she is far slighter than her powerfully built husband, but her spirit is strong: "You’s de onliest least thing whut ever kep up wid me one day, leff alone for weeks" (241, 133).

Mandy cooks for Grandpa in "That Will Be Fine," but she seems to have disappeared the day before Christmas, missing her duties as cook and leaving her cabin mysteriously "locked on the inside" (274).

In Light in August Mame is a big, brass-haired woman. During the day she sits "like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield," behind a cigar case near the front of the dingy restaurant where Christmas meets Bobbie (175). At night she is the madam of the small town brothel which she runs with her husband.

The "Malbrouck" who is mentioned in "Barn Burning" is a real historical figure named John Churchill; "Malbrouck" is a corruption of Churchill's title as First Duke of Malborough. Between the 1670s and his death in 1722, Churchill rose from the rank of page to become one of the most influential generals and statesmen in English history. While serving five English monarchs, he never neglected his own ambitions for power and wealth.

In "Centaur in Brass" the mayor of Jefferson who is reportedly having an affair with Mrs. Flem Snopes is named Hoxey; according to town gossip, this affair account's for "her husband's rise in Hoxey's administration" (151). Hoxey is described the town's "lone rich middle-aged bachelor" and "a graduate of Yale" (151). His relationship with Mrs. Snopes clearly prefigures Eula Snopes' and Mayor Manfred de Spain's affair in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

Two characters referred to as "Major de Spain" appear in fifteen different fictions. Only one was a real Confederate "Major" during the Civil War; the other is his son, Manfred, who fought in the Spanish-American War as a Lieutenant but is called "Major" as a courtesy, and as a sign of the family's high status in Yoknapatawpha. They never appear together, but in four texts - "Shall Not Perish," The Town, The Mansion and The Reivers - both are referred to, and in those cases, it is easy to tell which "De Spain" Faulkner has in mind.