Character Keys

Margaret (Maggie) Mallison is Judge Stevens' daughter, Gavin's twin sister, Charles Mallison's wife and Chick's mother. The role she plays in the six late fictions in which she appears or is mentioned is largely defined by her relationship to these male figures, especially to her son, toward whom she is unfailingly protective despite his own restiveness with her concerns. She is well-educated, within the limits defined by her gender and her caste: she attended the Jefferson Female Academy, where she met and became friends with the woman whom Gavin would eventually marry.

The historical Madame de Pompadour who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" was the primary mistress of Louis XV, an 18th century King of France. Issetibbeha returns home from France with some furniture reputedly owned by Louis XV.

In As I Lay Dying "Mr. Gillespie's boy" Mack helps his father and the Bundrens move Addie's coffin into the barn, and then later works to help save the Gillespies' livestock from the fire in the barn (216). During the fireVardaman notes that his legs "fuzz" in the moonlight (216).

In The Reivers Lycurgus is "a pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen" (162), and the grandson of Uncle Parsham Hood. Hood's daughter Mary is his mother; the narrative never mentions the man named Briggins who is his father. A very polite young man, he even refers to Ned as "Mr. McCaslin," confusing Lucius, who obviously assumes he must be speaking about a white man (222).

The Luster in The Reivers works in the livery stable, though his specific job is not made clear. (There's no suggestion that this Luster is the same person who works for the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.)

Described in The Hamlet as a "thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat," Lump's mother grew up in a large family plagued by "a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies" (218). Despite her desire to better herself through education and teaching, she married a "man under indictment" and gave birth to a son that she named after the Arthurian knight Launcelot as an act of "quenchless defiance" against the grim circumstances of her life. She died soon after.

According to The Hamlet, this member of the Snopes family was under indictment for stealing a "drummer's sample-case of shoes, all of the right foot" (218) when he married a schoolteacher and fathered one son with her before her untimely death.

Minnie's former husband in Sanctuary - the first text in which she appears - is described as a "cook in a restaurant" who "didn't approve of Minnie's business" as a maid in a brothel, so he took everything he could from her and "went off with a waitress in the restaurant" (209-10). Minnie sounds glad to be rid of him. The husband referred to in The Mansion is named Ludus - and while he too steals Minnie's money, he also beats her savagely (89); although he's currently in prison, it's not clear that Minnie is rid of him.

Like her husband, Mrs. Houston is mentioned in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Her story is essentially the same: within a year of their marriage, she is killed by his horse, a dangerous stallion. But her maiden name changes, from Lucy Pate (in The Hamlet) to Letty Bookright (in The Town), as does the brief biography provided in those first two volumes, and as do the details of her death. She comes into focus most vividly in The Hamlet. Her essential role in the trilogy is to be the reason why Houston is a widower.

In The Reivers, his last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.

Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.

First introduced into the canon as Lucius (Luke) Provine in the short story "A Bear Hunt" (1934), where he is a major character, he recurs in the last two novels in the Snopes trilogy and The Reivers as Lucius Hogganbeck. As Provine, he is forty years old and almost toothless, a hanger-on at the hunting camp, a "tall, apparently strong and healthy man . . . who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64), as well as violent, shiftless and boozy.

In Light in August, Lucas Burch is "tall, young. Dark complected" (55). One of the "sawdust Casanovas" among the Doane's Mill workers, Lucas Burch impregnates and deserts Lena Grove in Alabama (6). He finds his way to Jefferson, where, unimaginatively changing his name to "Joe Brown," he takes a menial job in the planing mill, but he quits to join Christmas as partner in a bootleg whiskey business.

This sister of Rosa Millard appears or is mentioned in three of the Unvanquished stories. When she first appears, in "Raid," she is named "Louise"; her husband and son have both been killed in the Civil War, and the large Dennison plantation has been burned by the Yankees. Louise tries, ineffectually, to keep her daughter Drusilla from helping Rosa conduct her non-military raid on the Union troops in the area.

In "That Will Be Fine," the narrator's cousin Louisa is the young daughter of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

In The Sound and the Fury Louis Hatcher is an elderly black man who goes possum hunting with Quentin and Versh on a windless October night. Thinking of him, Quentin notes that he "never even used his [hunting] horn carrying it" (114). He does use the lantern he carries, but the last time he cleaned it, he tells Quentin, was during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; he and his wife Martha were afraid the flood waters would reach Yoknapatawpha. It is possible but very unlikely that he is the "Louis" who teaches Caddy how to drive a car (93).

In "Red Leaves" Louis Berry is one of the Indians who leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - a task which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. Louis is 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).

In The Sound and the Fury Lorraine is the woman Jason is seeing in Memphis, Tennessee. In the letter she sends him, she calls Jason "my sweet daddy" (193). Their relationship seems based on the money he gives her and the sex she gives him. Jason thinks of her as "a good honest whore" (233). His ideas about other people, especially women, are hardly reliable, but in this case it does seem likely that Lorraine is one of the many Memphis prostitutes in Faulkner's fiction.

The "defunct husband" of Mrs. Hait - called simply Hait in "Mule in the Yard" (252) and Lonzo Hait in The Town - was helping I.O. Snopes cheat the insurance company when he (along with a string of I.O.'s mules) was killed in a train accident on a blind curve next to his house in Jefferson. According to what his widow says to I.O. in both texts, "you paid him fifty dollars a trip each time he got mules in front of the train in time" (262, 262).

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon Quick 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. Nor is it absolutely clear how to disambiguate Lon Sr. and his son Lon Jr., or as they are sometimes referred to by other inhabitants of the Bend, "Big Lon" and "Little Lon." This entry is Lon Junior's, who appears in three texts altogether.

In "A Courtship," Log-in-the-Creek is the only one of the Chickasaw young men who does not stop courting Herman Basket's sister after Ikkemotubbe's interest in her becomes known. His unheroic name seems to fit his apparently negligible character: he cannot hold his liquor, and he "raced no horses and fought no cocks and cast no dice" (364).

Littlejohn is one of the neighbors present at the Bundren farm after Addie's death. He is also the man who told Armstid that the flood washed out the main road to Jefferson.

Linda's character comes into focus slowly but steadily across three decades and six fictions. In the first of those, Flags in the Dust, as Flem Snopes' "baby" she is not named nor even gendered. In the next, she still has no name or gender but Suratt, the narrator of "Spotted Horses," sees her clearly enough to call her "as well-growed a three-months-old baby as we ever see" (167) - implicitly suggesting she was conceived out of wedlock, and that Flem might not be her father.

Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).

In The Mansion Mack Lendon is "one of a big family of brothers in a big house" (205).

Lemuel Stevens - usually Judge Stevens, but "Captain Stevens" in "Tomorrow" (96) - is the father of Gavin, and probably, although scholars disagree about this, the son of another man named Judge Stevens. He appears or is mentioned in 7 different texts. We see him in his role as a judge, but the military title is confusing, since there is no evidence that any of the Stevens family serve in either the U.S. or the Confederate armies.

Greenwood Leflore (as Requiem for a Nun spells his name, though LeFlore is historically more accurate) was the son of Rebecca Cravatt, the daughter of a Choctaw chief (not mentioned in the novel), and Louis LeFleur, a French Canadian fur trader. He was educated by white Americans in Nashville.

In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218).

Labove's sister, the only one of his five younger siblings to be individualized, is "about ten" years old in The Hamlet; like everyone in the family, she likes to wear the football cleats he brings home (114).

In The Hamlet Labove's father is small time farmer in "the next county" to Yoknapatawpha (114) who sees no point in his son going to a university to become a teacher. He is "annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop - the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn - to be done" (117).

As England's Secretary of State for War, a cabinet minister, Kitchener expanded the British army from twenty to seventy divisions between 1914 and 1916, hence the reference in "All the Dead Pilots" to "a mob of soldiers" (514).

In both "Pantaloon in Black" and Go Down, Moses Ketcham is an officer of the law who, despite his Dickensian name, works at the jail and deals with the men who have already been caught. He is at the jail trying to maintain order among the inmates when Rider is brought there. He is not named in Requiem for a Nun when Temple Drake Stevens describes his attempt to subdue the (also) unnamed Negro widower whose grief sends him into a frenzy.

In As I Lay Dying Eula is one of the two daughters of Cora and Vernon Tull. Apparently while the Tulls were in town she bought a "bead" necklace for "twenty-five cents," perhaps to appeal to Darl Bundren, whom she watches as he passes through the Bundren house (9). Either she or her sister is the daughter Whitfield refers to at Addie's funeral as "Tull's youngest" (179).

In The Sound and the Fury Julio is the older brother of the unnamed Italian girl whom Quentin tries to escort safely home from the bakery. Julio attacks Quentin, thinking that Quentin has tried to kidnap his sister, or as Julio himself puts it: "I killa heem . . . [he] steala my seester" (139). At the Squire's office Julio wants to press kidnapping charges, but instead accepts money from Quentin as compensation for the time he lost at work while chasing after him.

Sutpen's daughter Judith first appears in the prequel to Absalom!, the short story "Wash"; though her character is barely sketched, her actions often anticipate her story in the novel. As "Miss Judith" she lives alone in the big house on the Sutpen plantation during much of the Civil War, after the deaths of her mother and brother and while her father is away fighting (541).

In The Town Judge Long is the local judge who doesn't preside over Montgomery Ward Snopes' trial; in The Mansion, on the other hand, Judge Long is the presiding judge at Montgomery Ward Snopes' trial. Apparently between writing the two books Faulkner forgot the trouble that Flem Snopes went to in the first one to make sure his relative never appeared in Long's courtroom. In this second novel, Montgomery Ward refers to him as "that old sanctimonious lantern-jawed son of a bitch up there on that Federal bench" (77).

Judge Gowan is the judge in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses who quickly and informally finds a common-sense way to dispose of the case against Lucas and George. Although he only appears in this one episode, Faulkner gives him a long history in Yoknapatawpha when, in the short story, Lucas recognizes him as the gentleman who, "thirty and forty years ago," used to stay with "Old Zach Edmonds" on the plantation during quail hunting season (222). The novel lengthens this pedigree: there Lucas remembers him from "old Cass' time forty and fifty years ago" (71).

In "Smoke," the story where he makes his first appearance, Judge Dukinfield is "a widower of sixty and more, portly, white-headed, with an erect and dignified carriage which the Negroes called 'rear-backted'" (12). The judge has a daughter named Emma. During his seventeen years as a Chancellor, his official judgments have been guided by the belief "that justice is fifty per cent legal knowledge and fifty per cent unhaste and confidence in himself and in God" (12).

Mink Snopes' murder trial is described, at least briefly, in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Though the judge who presides over the trial is not named until the third volume - in The Mansion he is referred to, once, as "Judge Brummage" (48) - there's no reason not to assume that Faulkner imagined the same person on the bench in all three accounts.

Juana is the Hispanic wife of Nathaniel Burden and the mother of Calvin Burden II in Light in August. Born in Mexico, she waits a dozen years to get married and legitimize her child. In 1866 she comes to Jefferson with her husband and father-in-law. She dies not long after her son is killed by Colonel Sartoris, though in the account of her family that Joanna - who is named after her - gives Joe Christmas, she does not mention the cause of Juana's death.

Joseph Conrad is a British writer best known for works such as The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. He makes an appearance in "Knight's Gambit" when Gavin describes the Parisian street where he once visited Mrs. Harriss as the kind of street one can visit "simply by opening the right page in Conrad" (256).

Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).

The John Sevier mentioned by Aunt Jenny in The Unvanquished was a frontiersmen whose adventures made him a hero "to small boys or fool young women" (244).

Bayard Sartoris names his only son John, after his father the Colonel. This John II is a very minor character, even in Flags in the Dust, the only text to describe him or rather his life in any detail. He married Lucy Cranston, with whom he fathered the twin sons, Bayard (III) and John (III), who are both important characters in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction. Unlike his father, he followed the family's military tradition, fighting for the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. He died in 1901, succumbing to yellow fever and a wound suffered during the war.

In The Reivers John Powell is "the head hostler" at the Priest livery stable (4). A hostler is someone who looks after horses. On his twenty-first birthday, as "ineffaceable proof that he was . . . a man" (6), he bought a pistol that he carries to work in his overalls. Having the gun in the stable is against the rules, but he and Maury Priest handle this "moral problem" (6) by ignoring the its existence, "as mutual gentlemen must and should" (8). The novel does not discuss how Powell's race - he is black - might figure in the way he defines 'manhood' or defies the rules.

This man appears in four texts under three different names; in all four he is associated with World War I, but in very different ways. In "Dry September" he is John McLendon, a decorated veteran who takes command of the lynch mob; he has a "heavy-set body," an aggressive temperament, and a wife whom he violently abuses (171). He plays a much smaller role as McLendon in Light in August: a customer at the barbershop who was there when Christmas "run in and dragged [Lucas Burch] out" (87).

When Gavin refers to "John L. Lewis' C.I.O." in The Mansion he is referring to the American labor leader who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 (236).