Character Keys

The group of "young men" who are attracted to Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" includes, but is by no means limited to, Owl-by-Night and Sylvester's John (363). Without exception, these would-be suitors "look away" from her once Ikkemotubbe's interest becomes known (363). They even help him in his efforts to attract her attention. At the end of the story, at least some of these "young men" leave the plantation on the steamboat with David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe (380), but the text does not say how far they go.

Cotton is the main crop of Yoknapatawpha, and as Flags in the Dust points out, it is raised by two very different kinds of growers - planters or croppers - on two very different kinds of land: the "other planters further up the valley" from the Sartorises own the county's rich bottom land, while the "smaller croppers" have to manage "with their tilted fields among the hills" (289).

The Town refers to the "Yankee raiders" who were present in Mississippi during the Civil War as the stuff of "legend" - the legend of the treasure that remains hidden where the plantation owners supposedly buried their "money and plate" to keep them safe from these invaders (8). (In earlier Yoknapatawpha fictions, the Sartorises did bury their silver and Union troops did dig it up.)

In The Town Charles mentions that "one of Captain McClendon's company was wounded in the first battle in which American troops were engaged and was back in his uniform with his wound stripe in 1918" (123). He is the first veteran of World War I to return to Jefferson. (Historically, this first battle was the Battle of Cantigny, 28 May 1918.)

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)

As a group the men who work at the planing mill in Light in August observe and comment on the appearance and behavior of Joe Christmas and Joe Brown during and after the nearly three years these two outsiders work there too. On the Saturday Lena arrives in Jefferson, they see the smoke of the fire and joke about it - and about the Burdens, who they see as outsiders too.

The "Jackson women" who in Requiem for a Nun sponsor the three-day "Kermis Ball" to raise money for a Confederate monument in 1887 may belong to an early version of a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (87). The term "kermis" refers to an outdoor festival.

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 both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, these women help Mrs. Armstid cope with her circumstances by giving her materials - "string saved from packages and bits of cloth" to weave into "fancy objects" she can sell ("Lizards," 142) . In The Hamlet Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" (360).

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" displays considerable sympathy for the impact of war on women who remain at home while the men in their lives are at the front, going so far as to say that they "died" on the day war was declared (514). This group includes the "mothers and sweethearts" to whom the soldiers write letters from the war (512), and the "three day wives and three-year widows" whom the soldiers marry hastily on their way to the war (514).

Lying in the dark at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary, Temple remembers being in her dorm in college, talking with other women students as they all dressed for a dance. One of them is accused by the others of knowing too much about sex and another, "the youngest one," is made sick by the conversation (152).

"The Unvanquished" - both the story and the novel with that title - includes an unusual reference to "white women" and "Negroes" (149, 93). The text brings these two groups together as the people in Yoknapatawpha who are equally threatened by the existence of Grumby's gang of "Independents" - though the "white women" are "frightened" while the Negroes are "tortured" (149, 93), and that it's hard to see what place Negro women occupy in this phrasing.

Among the people attending Red's funeral in Sanctuary, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.

In "Raid" and then again in The Unvanquished, this woman informs Rosa Millard that she and her party have entered Mississippi.

Referred to as "another lady" in Intruder in the Dust this woman angers another woman in Frenchman's Bend, apparently by winning a baking competition (227). Her husband is locally well-known and -patronized as a maker of moonshine whiskey. The narrative's use of "lady" is clearly sarcastic.

In The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin looks around after Shreve pumps water on his face, he sees a "woman cross the door" of a nearby house, "but she didn't look out" (165).

This young woman in Flags in the Dust is described as "a slim, long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes" (384). She is Bayard's companion at the Chicago night club where he agrees to fly the experimental plane; her mouth may be bold, but she says she is afraid of him: "He'll do anything" (386).

In Sanctuary Ruby tells Temple that she once gave away a fur coat "to a woman in an alley" (62). Ruby lived in many different places, so there's no way to tell what city the alley might be in - and the text provides no other information about the woman at all.

In Light in August this "gaunt, leatherhard woman" recognizes Joe Christmas when he comes to her door for food; when he asks "what day this is," she tells him it is Tuesday, and threatens to call her man if he doesn't go away (332).

In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.

In "All the Dead Pilots" these are the women who married the aviators who survived the First World War and the children who were born to them in "suburban homes almost paid out" (512).

The younger of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a youth, less than twenty, by his face" (67). He tells Stevens that, after the discovery, he "won't never eat another" fish (74).

After Sartoris' trick in "All the Dead Pilots," "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, Wing Commanders were in charge of multiple squadroons. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, himself a brigadier general in a different branch of the British military.

The Mississippi wilderness in Requiem for a Nun is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (10).

In The Reivers the "fat iron-gray woman in pince-nez" who opens the door at the Parsham doctor's house might be his sister, but since he mentions his marriage a few pages later it seems more likely that she is his wife (185).

In "Hand upon the Waters" Nate's wife appears in the novel only as another voice in the darkness at their cabin, when readers hear her telling her husband to "let them white folks alone" (80) - suggesting she has more authority over Nate than Gavin Stevens does.

She stands in the doorway of her small farm house and watches Hub, Suratt and Young Bayard as they leave to go to town in Flags in the Dust. There is apparently reproach in her look, but in her "flat country voice," she speaks only one word, "Hub" (138).

In The Hamlet this woman tries to discourage her husband from pursuing Ike Snopes.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the wife of the deputy who narrates much of the last section of the story is described as "a stout woman, handsome once, graying now and with a neck definitely too short, who looked not harried at all but choleric" (252, 147). She is impatient with her husband, and preoccupied with her own concerns; her rapid movements between kitchen and dining room suggest her lack of interest in her husband's account of a black man's lynching.

In The Hamlet Hoake McCarron is involved in a scandal with this wife of a "minor instructor" at the agricultural college he attends (151).

The wife of the German prisoner in "Ad Astra" is described by her husband as "the daughter of a musician who wass peasant" (418). While he is at war, she lives in Bayreuth with their son. She keeps her husband informed by letter of significant changes in the family.

In The Unvanquished this woman - even though she is dirt poor (literally, as she lives in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills") - maintains her pride by throwing back the money John Sartoris offers her after he shot her husband (221).

In The Hamlet this Memphis wholesaler provides Ratliff with his sewing machines.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the crowd that watches as the coffin carrying Samuel Beauchamp is taken off the train contains a "number of Negroes and whites both" (265, 363). The Negroes include "men and women too," but the white people there are described as "idle white men and youths and small boys"; there do not seem to be any white women among the spectators (265, 363).

These "properly-educated white teachers" appear in The Mansion as an idea: they are the teachers whom Linda Snopes Kohl wants Jefferson to hire to instruct the students who attend the town's "Negro school" (250).

Clarence Snopes invents this soldier as part of his smear campaign against Devries in The Mansion, spreading the rumor that during the war Devries chose to save the Negro soldier and left this white one to die (345).

Most of the time if Faulkner's narrative does not specify someone's race, it is safe to assume they are 'white,' and the majority of the characters in Light in August are 'white' too. But the "white people" this entry specifically refers to are the residents of Jefferson who live in the neighborhood next to the town's black district, whom Christmas sees during his walk on Friday evening.

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard refers to the men who work with John Sartoris to resist any effort to give voting rights to the recently emancipated slaves as "all the men in the county" and "all the other men in Jefferson" (69, 58; 204, 188). They assemble in the town square "with pistols in their pockets" (69) to prevent black men from voting, and ride out afterwards to the Sartoris place with John and Drusilla to cast their own votes in the election.

These are "the white men" from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon, a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) in Absalom!, deliberately provokes a racial reaction: they refuse to believe he was "a negro," believing instead that his relationship with her proves that he was "besotted" by "sexual perversion" (167).

These characters are created by an implication in "That Evening Sun." When Mr. Compson tells Nancy that she should "just let white men alone" (295), he suggests that Mr. Stovall may not be the only white man with whom she has had sex. So by that implication, these are the other men who buy sex from Nancy.

In The Reivers, this "white man" is the "blackguard" who takes advantage of Bobo's "country-bred" naivete to get him in debt, and then forces him to steal the horse named Coppermine (281).

In Absalom! Wash Jones recruits this person - identified only as "another white man" (121) - to help with Charles Bon's burial.

"Red Leaves" says that "a white man" taught Issetibbeha how to take snuff (321). It does not say anything about the man.

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 Intruder in the Dust Lucas commissions "a white boy . . . on a mule" to carry the gallon bucket of molasses he is giving Chick into town (22).

In "A Courtship" the "whisky-trader" who apparently makes regular visits to the Chickasaws brings the whiskey on which the tribe's young men get Log-in-the-Creek drunk (364). What he trades his whiskey for is not specified.

When Nathaniel and Juana get married in Kansas, Joanna tells Christmas in Light in August, "everybody they could get word to or that heard about it, came" (250).

In The Unvanquished Bayard assumes this "watchman" or "picquet" must have been watching to report his arrival at Sartoris to the other veterans of "Father's old troop" (232); he does not actually appear in the novel.