Character Keys

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's mother is the daughter of a genteel church-going couple without substantial means. By the time she has her first and only child, she has been an invalid for almost twenty years, possibly because she was malnourished during the Civil War.

In Sanctuary Jenny tells Horace that the last "young man" who tried courting Narcissa was "that Jones boy; Herschell" (24). From that it sounds as if Herschell belonged to a family the Benbows and Sartorises would have known socially, but beyond that we know nothing about him.

There are both Bookwrights and Bookrights in Frenchman's Bend in various texts. Herman Bookwright appears in The Hamlet as one of Eula's fervent suitors, and one of the two young men from the Bend who leave the area "suddenly overnight" once it is discovered that she is pregnant - though Ratliff believes that both these young men were "just wishing they had" (140).

The real Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the U.S. (1929-1933). The "Herbert Hoover" who appears in The Mansion, however, is the creation of Gavin Stevens, who is trying to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation. away from Linda Snopes Kohl by writing an anonymous letter to "Herbert Hoover/F B & I Depment" accusing Flem Snopes of having a "commonist party Card" (269). The real head of the F.B.I. at the time, of course, was J.

In the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses Wyatt joins Will Legate, Roth Edmonds, and Ike McCaslin and some other men from Yoknapatawpha on the hunting trip to the Delta. There are five other 'Wyatts' in four other Yoknapatawpha fictions, but how or if Henry is related to any of them is never mentioned.

Henry is the second of Virginius MacCallum's six sons in Flags in the Dust and the only one who doesn't appear with the other five in "The Tall Men." In view of that absence, the descriptions of his character in the novel in which he does appear are significant. He is "squat" and "slightly tubby," with "something domestic, womanish" about him (335). Unlike his brothers, he spends "most of the time" inside: he superintends the kitchen, is "a better cook" than the black woman who is the family's official cook, and is locally famous for the quality of his homemade whiskey (335).

Henry Ford's name was almost synonymous with automobile during the early decades of the 20th century. The Model T Ford, which he introduced in 1908, brought owning a car within the reach of average Americans - though the car that Grandfather Priest owns in The Reivers is a much more aristocratic make and model.

In The Town Henry Best is the loudest and most exasperated man in Stevens' meeting with the town's aldermen to settle the questions raised by the stolen brass.

Henry Armstid, a subsistence farmer who lives in Frenchman's Bend, appears in two very different ways in seven different fictions. In As I Lay Dying, both the chapter he himself narrates and his actions reveal him to be generous, reliable and sane. In Light in August he displays the same traits as he helps Lena Grove on her journey.

Both "A Point of Law" and the revised version of that story Faulkner wrote for Go Down, Moses include a "deputy marshal" who sits inside the courthouse chewing a toothpick (221, 70). The novel version identifies him as an "oldish white man" whom Lucas knows from another context (70). In both texts the Judge calls him "Henry" (222, 72).

In "Knight's Gambit" Hence Cayley is the father of the "country girl" (192) who's been dating Max Harriss; according to her, "he dont think Max is any good" (193). His farm is "about two miles" from the Harriss place (192).

Harry Wong is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Harry Wong of San Francisco" (243).

Belle Mitchell's first husband Harry is described in Flags in the Dust as "a cotton speculator and a good one; he was ugly as sin and kind-hearted and dogmatic and talkative" (188). Conventional to a fault, Harry does not know his wife Belle is having an affair with Horace, whom he likes. After Belle divorces him, Young Bayard sees him in a Chicago nightclub with a young woman who is apparently trying to rob him. In Sanctuary, where Belle is married to Horace Benbow, he is just referred to as "a man named Mitchell" (106).

The first husband of the woman whom Gavin Stevens eventually marries is a bootlegger from New Orleans named only Mr. Harriss. Faulkner describes his offstage death memorably in three different texts: in "Knight's Gambit" he dies at his desk, "maybe," "because you can be shot just as discreetly across a desk in an office as anywhere else" (167–68); in The Town, he is brought back to Yoknapatawpha from New Orleans in "a bullet-proof hearse" (187); in The Mansion, he dies in a barber's chair, of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e.

In "Death Drag" Mr. Harris owns the car that Ginsfarb 'rents' for use in the air show - the quotation marks indicate how Ginsfarb skips town before paying him.

During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail.

General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom Cass Edmonds mentions in Go Down, Moses as part of his argument with Ike McCaslin about God's role in Southern history (271), was a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and as Cass notes, "on Cemetery Ridge" at Gettysburg (272).

In "Knight's Gambit" Hampton Killegrew is "the night marshal" of Jefferson (213).

Identified in Light in August as a "countryman" - i.e. a farmer from the county of Yoknapatawpha not the town of Jefferson (90) - Hamp Waller is the first person on the scene of Joanna's murder. Riding to town in a wagon with his family, he finds Joe Brown in the burning house. He also goes inside the house, where he finds Joanna Burden's body and brings it outside.

"Hal Wagner" 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 (109).

In As I Lay Dying, Grummet owns the hardware store in Mottson; Darl pressures him to open a sack of cement and sell the Bundrens 10 cents worth.

The outlaw named Grumby seems designed to strike every possible reader - regardless of race or region - as a villain. He first appears in the short story "The Unvanquished," as the leader of Grumby's Independents, an irregular group intent on terrorizing the Mississippi countryside, and the depredations of his gang make his name a source of terror to both the black and the white inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha.

In Light in August Lena Grove's father dies in the same summer as her mother does, when Lena is twelve years old. Both parents have impressed upon her a sense of filial duty; she takes care of her father at her mother's dying request and goes to live with her brother McKinley in accordance with her father's wish.

In The Hamlet the second wife of Eustace's father is his step-mother, and a "Fite" (399).

The man the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" calls "Grandpap" is actually his father's grandfather. Sounding like the boy he is, the narrator says he is "old, so old you just wouldn't believe it" (111). In his dotage all he talks about is "the Confederate war," though the narrative does not say how he was involved in the Civil War (112). (The narrator's mother's grandfather also served in the Civil War, but his last name wouldn't have been Grier.)

Weddel is pursuing Sally Priest, a married woman, and sends her a corsage. His first name, Grenier, comes from one of the founding Yoknapatawpha families - but The Town, where he appears, says nothing about a genealogical connection to that family.

The "grandpa" of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is married to grandma, and the father of Louisa, Sarah, and Rodney. He knows his son is a criminal but covers for him as long as possible, apparently taking refuge or solace in anger and his "tonic," which he keeps in a bottle in his desk - a desk which Rodney knows how to "prize open" in order to sneak his own (alcoholic) "dose" (266).

In "That Will Be Fine," Grandma is married to Grandpa and is mother to Aunt Louisa, Sarah, and Uncle Rodney. She is Georgie's maternal grandmother, but Georgie pays little attention to her.

In "Smoke" Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words.

We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.

The Stevenses are an old Jefferson family that becomes a very big part of the story of Yoknapatawpha by way of Faulkner's fondness for Gavin. The first member of the family to appear in the fictions is "Judge Stevens" in "A Rose for Emily," but in Sanctuary Gavin's second cousin Gowan becomes the first Stevens to play a significant role. And in Sanctuary Faulkner's treatment of Gowan is scathing. He's a recent graduate of the University of Virginia who likes to claim that he learned there both how to hold his liquor and how to be a gentleman.

Referred to in the script as "GOVERNOR" and addressed, by Gavin, only by his first name - "Henry" (90) - the man who meets with Gavin and Temple in Act II of Requiem for a Nun to hear an informal appeal on behalf of Nancy is referred to as "the last, the ultimate seat of judgment" (89). In the stage directions he is identified not with Mississippi but with a "mythical" State, "the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit" (89) - though elsewhere in the novel there is no ambiguity about the literary 'fact' that Yoknapatawpha is in Mississippi.

In Absalom!, the man who is Rosa Coldfield's "papa" and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .

In "Death Drag" Ginsfarb is the barnstorming wing walker who performs the aerobatic stunts suggested by the story's title. His characterization emphasizes his Jewish ethnicity, sometimes in very stereotypical ways. Although he is a "short man," his "nose" would "have fitted a six-foot body" (187); he is so greedy for money that he can't be trusted to negotiate with the small towns the team performs in: "he'd stick out for his price too long" and so might well attract the attention of "anybody that might catch them" running the illegal show (195, 194).

The only son of Kentucky aristocrats, Gerald Bland is a Harvard University classmate of Quentin Compson. In The Sound and the Fury they come to blows, violently but anti-climatically, when Quentin projects his rage against Caddy's suitors onto him. In many ways Bland is Quentin's polar opposite, the Fortinbras to Quentin Compson's Hamlet-like character: Gerald is adored by his mother, an accomplished lady's man, athletic and decisive.

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that name in The Unvanquished, George Wyatt is a former member of Colonel John Sartoris' "troop" (58, 187) and a key ally in his campaign to keep freed blacks from either voting or being elected. The Wyatts whom Faulkner had written about in his earlier fictions, Flags in the Dust and "A Rose for Emily," belong to the town's upper class, but there is no overt indication that George is a member of that family or (other than the fact that he is literate) about his own rank, in society or in the army.

George Washington Carver was an early 20th century Negro scientist and inventor who promoted crops, especially peanuts and sweet potatoes, as alternatives to cotton. The principal of Jefferson's Negro school mentions him in The Mansion when talking with Gavin about Linda Snopes' efforts to reform education for the country's black children (248).

Among the well-known sportsmen who come to Parsham every winter for the "National Trials" of pedigree bird dogs, Lucius mentions four names. Two are identifiable as real men (Horace Lytle and Paul Rainey). Lucius, the narrator of The Reivers, compares "George Peyton" to Lytle: the two are "as magical among bird dog people" as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb are to baseball fans (189).

The George who appears in Sanctuary seems to be the regular porter on the train between Oxford and Holly Springs. Clarence Snopes invariably tips him with a cigar instead of cash, but when Horace asks George what he is going to do with it, he replies "I wouldn't give it to nobody I know" (177).

The "Wilcox" that Gavin refers to in Intruder in the Dust is General Cadmus Wilcox, commander of a Confederate brigade that took part in Pickett's Charge during the battle of Gettysburg (190).

General Thomas Jackson - better known as Stonewall Jackson, a nickname he earned in the first major battle of the Civil War - was a corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He is mentioned in eight of the fictions. What Mr. Compson in Absalom! calls Jackson's "ruthless tactical skill" was demonstrated in a number of battles (223), including the 1862 campaign "in the [Shenandoah] Valley" referred to in Go Down, Moses (274), when he successfully thwarted three Union armies. His high status among the whites in Yoknapatawpha is attested to in several ways.

A Union general named Smith is mentioned in four of the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His first name never appears. There were two Union Generals named Smith who fought Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mississippi at various times after the fall of Vicksburg. General William Sooy Smith was defeated by Forrest on February 22, 1864 in the Battle of Okolona, and did in fact fight Forrest "up and down the road to Memphis" - as Faulkner's General Smith does in "The Unvanquished" and again in the novel with that name (79, 128).

Robert E. Lee, the most famous of the generals who led the Confederate forces during the Civil War, is mentioned in 11 different Yoknapatawpha fictions. For most of the war he was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, where the Confederate regiment mustered in Jefferson was fighting, but at the beginning of 1865, the last year of the war, he was appointed General-in-Chief of the Confederate States Army. He never appears in person.

After serving in the Civil War's western theater, the Union general Philip Sheridan came east when Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to command the cavalry forces in the Army of the Potomac. What Gumbault tells Pearson in "The Tall Men" about how "Sheridan's calvary blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley" at the very end of the war is accurate (54).

While James Longstreet is not nearly as mythic a Confederate figure as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or J.E.B. Stuart (only one character in the fictions, for example, is named after him, and even then the character's full name is "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry"), as a general and corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia Longstreet probably understood and practiced the more modern warfare that emerged on the battlefields better than any other Confederate commander.

A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673).

The historical figure General Joseph Johnston - often referred to as Joe - is mentioned in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, though he doesn't appear in any of them. For much of the Civil War he was in charge of Confederate forces in the western theater, which included Mississippi.

The Confederate General whom Ringo and Bayard take turns playing in "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, John Pemberton, was a historical figure. A career Army officer born in the North, Pemberton decided at the start of the Civil War to serve in the Confederate army - in part because he had married a southerner and in part because he had lived in the South for many years. He was in command of Vicksburg during Grant's 1862-1863 campaign against that river town, and surrendered it to the Union forces on the Fourth of July, 1863.

General Wheeler fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Three decades later he fought for the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Bayard Sartoris in "My Grandmother Millard" says that "Father would have called [him an] apostate" for fighting under the American flag, and the story quotes another Confederate general, Jubal Early, as saying Wheeler will go to hell for that betrayal of the Lost Cause (673).