Character Keys

In Absalom! Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner. Beardsley's name is also mentioned in Light in August.

The number of children born on the Armstid farm in Frenchman's Bend is either four or five. A character in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" refers to them as "them chaps" (138), but at least one is a daughter: in "Spotted Horses," Ina May, the only one ever named, is twelve, and "big enough to take care of the little ones" while their mother is at Mrs. Littlejohn's nursing their father (178). Though unnamed, she plays the same role in The Hamlet. In Light in August there are five children, all born "in six years," and now "raised to man- and womanhood" (15).

In "Smoke" Anselm Junior is one of the twin sons of Anselm Holland. He seems to have inherited his father's violent misanthropy along with his name, although he "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). He is the first of the twins to break with their father, moving "back into the hills" of Yoknapatawpha (5). He is "a dark, silent, aquiline-faced man" whom "both neighbors and strangers let severely alone" (6).

Anse McCallum is one of Buddy McCallum's twin sons in "The Tall Men": "two absolutely identical blue-eyed youths" (49) who are mentioned together as "the twin McCallum nephews" of Rafe in "Knight's Gambit" (210). He also appears, but without any mention of his twin brother, The Town. In the first story he and his brother Lucius have identical histories. They are "wild as spikehorn bucks" as children (55). Later, they go to the agricultural college to learn how to raise whiteface cattle.

Anse Bundren is a farmer by vocation, but he is perhaps more accurately described with a term Faulkner's fiction regularly applies to the Snopeses: parasite. Unlike Flem, however, Anse is rendered comically rather than as a threat to the social order. He is described as a "kind of tall, gaunted man" (203). Physically his most striking feature seems to be his hair; Peabody calls it "pushed and matted up . . . like a dipped rooster" (44).

Andrew Jackson first achieved fame as a military leader in the War of 1812 with the British and in later conflicts with the Creek and the Seminole Indians. As commander of American forces in the 'old southwest,' which included Mississippi, he negotiated treaties with other tribes; "A Courtship" mentions the one he signed with the Chickasaw that lived in the region where Yoknapatawpha imaginatively exists. Jackson became the seventh President of the U.S.

Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) McCaslin is the son of Old Carothers McCaslin and the twin brother of Theophilus (Uncle Buck). He is an outstanding poker player, a good cook and housekeeper, and a less significant presence in the fiction that his brother. During the Civil War present of The Unvanquished Buddy is in Virginia fighting in Tennant's brigade after beating his brother in a card game for the privilege of serving in the Confederate regiment that was raised in Yoknapatawpha.

According to Aunt Jenny's story in Flags in the Dust, Allan is the Confederate officer who reminds General J.E.B. Stuart of his duty to the army in order to keep him from following Carolina Bayard on his reckless quest for anchovies.

In The Hamlet the mother of Hoake McCarron, Alison McCarron, comes from wealth as her deceased mother was the daughter of a "well-to-do" landowner (149). At nineteen, she eloped with Mr. McCarron a gambler with no definite past, climbing out of a second-story window to avoid her father. Her story is omitted in The Mansion, where she is merely described as a "well-to-do" widow (139).

This Alice cooks for Miss Ballenbaugh in The Reivers, and very well too: after eating her food, Lucius "knows why the hunters and fishermen come back" to stay at Ballenbaugh's inn (76). Unmarried, she says she "aint studying no husband" (75).

In The Reivers Alexander is the youngest of Lucius Priest's three brothers, and still in diapers. His birth just before or during "last winter" is mentioned in the text (44).

One of the first white men in Yoknapatawpha, Alexander Holston established a tavern in Jefferson before the town had any name at all. The "Holston House" that survives in the town in the mid-20th century has had several remodelings, but is still run by descendants with the same last name - making them and the business the most definite point of continuity between Yoknapatawpha's past and its present.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider's "Unc Alec" tells him that his aunt wants him to come home (249, 143). Alec is Rider's "aunt's husband," "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (245, 138).

In As I Lay Dying Albert works at "the fountain" - that is, the counter where one can buy ice cream or a soda - in Moseley's drugstore in Mottson (199); he is also the person who tells Moseley about the altercation between the marshal and Anse in front of Grummet’s hardware store.

Elly's grandmother - Elly's father's mother - lives in Elly's family's home in Jefferson, though she is formerly of Louisiana. Her given name is Ailanthia, as is that of the granddaughter after whom "Elly" is titled. Elly's grandmother is frequently described as cold: "cold, piercing" (209), with "that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf," having lost her hearing 15 years before the story takes place (212). The narrator calls her an "old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped" (223).

Ad - Admiral Dewey Snopes - is one of Eck Snopes' children. He was named after a hero of the Spanish-American War.

In Intruder in the Dust Adam Fraser owns the "crossroads store" (18) near the scene of Vinson Gowrie's murder. Apparently he helps Constable Skipworth keep Lucas safe from harm until the sheriff can arrest him; that seems to be what Gavin means when he tells Lucas he was likely to come to grief "old Skipworth and Adam Fraser or not" (222).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Acey is a member of Rider's mill gang who is present at Mannie's funeral. He tries to offer comfort in the form of company and “a jug in de bushes” (239, 130).

According to Requiem for a Nun, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938).

At the Sartoris Thanksgiving dinner in Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody mentions Abe as one of the gillies who help the gentlemen who come to fish his pond. ("Gilly" is a Scottish term for a servant who assists a fisherman.) When asked "how many [other black retainers] have you got," Peabody says "six or seven" adults, and an unspecified number of "scrubs" (i.e. children), but they are not named (303).

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.

This character - V.K. Ratliff's partner in the Jefferson restaurant that ultimately becomes Flem's, and then later the town's night watchman - is named Aaron Rideout when he first appears, in The Hamlet. In the next two volumes of the Snopes trilogy he appears as Grover Cleveland Winbush. (When Random House published the trilogy in one volume in 1964, they regularized his character as Winbush in all three novels.)

In Flags in the Dust Little Belle is the young daughter of Belle and Harry Mitchell who, by the end, is Horace Benbow's step-daughter - though Belle herself makes it clear to her new acquaintances in the new town she lives in "that Horace is not her real daddy" (378). When she appears again in Sanctuary she is a young woman.