Character Keys

The man whom Lucius refers to in The Reivers as the "first Wylie" seems to have played a major role in shaping Yoknapatawpha County (71). When he set up his store at a crossing over the Tallahatchie River, the Indians still lived in the area. Because his place was "the head of navigation" - the furthest "small steamboats" could travel upriver from the Mississippi - the "whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy" that Yoknapatawpha imported from Vicksburg and the "cotton and furs" that it shipped out to the world were loaded or unloaded at his place (72).

In The Reivers "Mack Winbush's" is where one can buy the moonshine whiskey that Cal Bookwright makes (12), but the text does not say if Winbush's is a farm or juke joint or something else.

The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190).

The "folks" whom Vera is visiting in The Reivers are presumably her parents (99).

In The Reivers Son Thomas is "the youngest driver" who works at Maury Priest's livery stable (4). The "Son" in his name is not connected to any specific parents.

At the end of The Reivers Lucius notes that "Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the [school] work" he missed while having his adventure in Tennessee (296). She is obviously his teacher - and a very understanding one too.

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.

Mr. Powell is John Powell's father in The Reivers. John works for him "on the farm" to earn the money with which he buys "a .41 caliber snub-nosed revolver" from him (6).

As Ned puts it in The Reivers, the Parsham constable, Mr. Poleymus, "may be little, and he may be old; but he's a man, mon" (251). Ned admires the way he takes care of his wife, who has had a stroke, washing and feeding her. He also sorts out the various characters and their doings with a clear sense of humanity and justice.

In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree.

Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).

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!.)

The Colonel's wife is away during The Reivers, visiting in "Monteagle," which is the name of a real town in southeastern Tennessee (277).

The mother of Lucius' mother. The only information about her that Lucius provides in The Reivers is that "Grandmother and Grandmother Lessep lived far enough apart to continue to be civil and even pleasant" to each other (45). "Grandmother" is his father's mother. The Lesseps live 300 miles from Jefferson.

In The Reivers Alexander Lessep is the brother of Lucius' mother, Alison, and the "great-uncle" of Lucius' grandson (45). Lucius' youngest brother is named after him.

In The Reivers Miss Reba mentions "Jackie" as the woman in her brothel she tells to lock the door during the day after the adventurers leave for Parsham (196). Jackie may be a prostitute, but that is not made clear.

Like Lucas' Beauchamp's cabin in Intruder in the Dust, Parsham Hood's cabin in The Reivers contains "a big gold-framed portrait on a gold easel" (244). The woman in the picture - "not very old but in old-timey clothes" (244) - is certainly his deceased wife.

The man in The Reivers who in 1886 "converts the entire settlement" at Ballenbaugh's "with his fists" is named Hiram Hightower (74). His description allows us to say for sure that he is "a giant of a man," and served during the Civil War as both a "trooper" and a "chaplain" in Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry unit (74).

Wade Hampton fought with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He was a brigadier general during the fighting at Gaine's Mill in 1862. In The Reivers Lucius' great-grandfather was serving under Hampton as "a color-sergeant" until being wounded in that battle (278).

Nathan Bedford Forrest had two brothers who also served as Confederate officers during the Civil War: Colonel Jeffrey Edward Forrest and Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Anderson Forrest. Either could have been the officer in charge of the event Lucius recalls in The Reivers - "legend to some people maybe.

This character is mentioned in The Reivers as an "idiot nephew or cousin or something" of Dan Grinnup, and like him is a last living descendant of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha (7). He lives "in a tent in the river jungle beyond Frenchman's Bend," on land that had once been part of the big antebellum "plantation" belonging to Louis Grenier (the "Frenchman" from whom the Bend gets its name, 7).

"When Father was a boy," Lucius Priest says in The Reivers, "he used to fox hunt with old Dan's father out at Frenchman's Bend" (8). Dan is Dan Grinnup, but his father's last name could have been Grenier. He was descended from Louis Grenier, the man from whom Frenchman's Bend gets its name. Because Dan and a "cousin or something" are the last living descendants of Grenier at the time of the story (8), we know his father is dead.

In his description of the McCaslin-Edmonds' plantation house in The Reivers, Lucius mentions how "the women the successive Edmondses marry" have enlarged and transformed the original building (61). At least some of these wives appear in Go Down, Moses, and Louisa Edmonds, who appears in this novel, is presumably one of them as well.

In The Reivers Acheron's trainer - the "white man" whom Lycurgus refers to "Mr Walter" (221) - must be the same man whom a member of the crowd at the race calls "Walter Clapp" (235).

"Uncle" Parsham Hood's daughter and Lycurgus' mother is explicitly named "Briggins" - though her husband is not mentioned in The Reivers.

"Mr Ballott's first wife" was the daughter of Dan Grinnup (8). Ballott's other wife or wives are not mentioned, and The Reivers does not explain why he is no longer married to this woman, but divorce is so rare in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha that it seems likely she has died.

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).

The first Ballenbaugh in Yoknapatawpha is as colorful as the place that bears his name. Described in The Reivers as an "ancestryless giant," he arrived in the county "from nowhere" and by some means - the narrative implies a coercive one - took over the store and ferry run by a man named Wylie (72). Under his ownership, the place became a "roaring" one: a "grubbing station and saloon" for the wagon-drivers who passed through on the way to or from Memphis (72).

In The Reivers Otis tells Lucius that Aunt Fittie, who took Corrie in after her mother's death, "might have been kin to some of us," but that isn't definite (153). She lives "in a house on the edge" a small town in Arkansas and prostitutes the "eleven or twelve" year-old Corrie to local men for fifty cents a visit (154).

Requiem for a Nun identifies the voters in Yoknapatawpha during the hundred years after the building of the courthouse in 1835 as "the white male citizens of the county" (37). Historically of course, a pair of Constitutional amendments gave black males the right to vote in 1870 and women the vote in 1920, but perhaps the novel is reminding us about the peculiar (unwritten) constitution of the world Faulkner is representing.

In a facetious passage connecting the lost lock in 1826 to the future of the U.S., the narrator of Requiem for a Nun makes "a glorious prophecy" about the when when the American "people" will identify federal money with the "manna" of a generous god (17). They are described as "a race of laborers" whose only labor it to consume government funds (17).

In Requiem for a Nun Temple compares her own experience overcoming trauma to this fictional character. Although Faulkner blurs the details, saying that the book in which this woman appears was written by "somebody - Hemingway, wasn't it?" (121), it's very likely that Temple is thinking of Maria, a character in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Temple's account, this character freed herself from the past by "refusing to accept it" (121).

Describing her married life in Requiem for a Nun, Temple refers to the "country club younger set" of friends with whom she and Gowan socialize (124). Apparently assuming it is a progressive gesture, these friends "applaud" when Temple hires the black "ex-dope-fiend" Nancy as a nurse for her children (124).

Requiem for a Nun refers to three generations of descendants from the "Ratcliffe" who first arrived in the settlement that became Jefferson, and notes how over that time the name "lost the 'c' and the final 'fe' too" (13). Although he is not singled out in this text, the latest descendant is V.K. Ratliff, one of Faulkner's favorite characters - although in the Requiem passage Faulkner seems to have forgotten that his name still has both "f"s.

In "Knight's Gambit" Gavin Stevens learns that Max Harriss is "well known" to the "taxi-drivers" in the area of Memphis around the Greenbury Hotel (208).

In comparing Mr. Harriss to Huey Long in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison describes how the politician "made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere," probably not "even caring what the people who wrote and edited it" produced (241). Faulkner is referring to a real magazine, the Louisiana Progress.

In Intruder in the Dust the white people who crowd Jefferson's main streets in anticipation of the arrival of a lynch mob from Beat Four are from everywhere in Yoknapatawpha except Beat Four. It begins to form on Sunday morning, with a small group made up of young men from town.

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.

The young woman whom Bayard calls "Cousin Melisandre" in the short story with the long title "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" is a upper class refugee: she leaves Memphis after it is captured by the Union forces to spend the War at the Sartoris plantation in northern Mississippi. She seems related to Bayard on his mother's (Millard) side, but the only information the story provides about her family is General Forrest's reference to "that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian" (694).

Although Go Down, Moses does not say so explicitly, this man would have been a slave on the Beauchamp plantation before the Civil War. After it, he is an "ancient and quarrelsome" old man who continues to live with his former master, Hubert Beauchamp (289).

In "Two Soldiers" this is the first soldier that the Grier boy speaks to in Memphis. He is wearing an "arrerhead on his sleeve" (94), so he is possibly a member of the 36th Infantry Division ("Arrowhead"), which was activated on November 25, 1940.

In Absalom! Colonel Willow is the commander of the University Grays in 1865, when he allows his fellow officer, Colonel Sutpen, to use his headquarters tent to meet with Henry.

According to Mink's narrative in The Mansion, Fonzo Winbush's mother "wasn't a Snopes" (80). She tells Fonzo never to stay anywhere that isn't managed by a woman who looks "mature and Christian" and "most of all motherly" (80).

In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

Veterans who have returned from fighting in the Second World War are a major element of the social landscape in the second half of The Mansion. Goodyhay's unconventional congregation is made up mainly of vets, or their surviving parents and spouses; one of them wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been" to the church service (305). Because they know what "Devries's medal meant," veterans form an important element in the anti-Snopes coalition during the 1946 Congressional election (346).

The female clientele at the "joint" where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion would be more surprised by an ear trumpet than a "G string" (275). They are presumably, like Linda, women who work in the shipyard because the male population has gone to fight in the war; the reference to the "G string" as well as the noise in the "joint" is the narrative's way of implying how non-traditional, by the standards of southern gentility, is their behavior and appearance.

In The Mansion there are a number of couples waiting in line to get married by the "REGISTRAR" at New York's City Hall (191).

The warden at Parchman when Mink first arrives there in The Mansion is remarkably kind to his prisoner, helping Mink with his correspondence to his wife.

In The Mansion McCarron is meticulously attended to by two waiters at the New York restaurant.