Character Keys

While he's in Memphis in The Mansion, Mink goes into a "dingy store" where he sees a "Negro man" who seems to be "running it" and "maybe he even owned it": after all his time in prison Mink wonders if "the new laws" mean a black man "could even own a store" (319).

This is one of the two groups of men in Absalom! from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon - a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) - deliberately provokes a racial reaction: "the negro stevedores and deckhands on steamboats . . . who thought he was a white man" (167).

When Lucius and Lycurgus enter Linscomb's stable in The Reivers they see "a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear" (220).

These are the other black soldiers whom Caspey Strother mentions in Flags in the Dust in the stories he brings home from World War I. He never mentions any of their names, usually referring to them as "boys," but he does refer specifically to two: "de Captain's dog-robber" and "a school boy" (59). (It's unclear what Caspey means by "dog-robber," but he may be mangling the term 'dogsbody' - a British term for a person who does minor tasks; as an officer, the "Captain" in the phrase would be likely to have someone in such a menial role.

In Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody's household of black servants includes, to quote his dehumanizing description of them, "six or seven registered ones" as well as "a new yearlin' every day or so" (303). Like Abe, the only servant who is named, their main task seems to be assisting the gentlemen and ladies who come to fish at the doctor's pond.

These are the "few Negro servants" in "Knight's Gambit" who worked for Mrs. Harriss' father in the past; they were the her only "companions" growing up (150).

In "Smoke" the servants of Old Anse Holland witness much of the tension between their master and his sons. On the night Young Anse leaves home for good, the scene was “of such violence that the Negro servants all fled the house and scattered for the night” (5).

In Sanctuary this servant works for the unnamed wealthy woman who befriends Popeye's mother. She is not specifically referred to as a Negro, but since nearly all the domestic servants in the fictions are black, we have chosen to identify her that way.

Described in Flags in the Dust as "a thin woman in a funereal purple turban" who eats with gestures of "elegant gentility" while visiting with Sis' Rachel in the kitchen, she is presumably the maid of one of the white ladies attending Belle Mitchell's afternoon social (26).

In Flags in the Dust, this railroad worker - referred to by Simon simply as a "section hand" (7) - is apparently the only witness to Young Bayard's 1919 return to Jefferson from World War I. It seems that he told Simon about it, and Simon in turn tells Old Bayard.

Apparently except for Fentry, the workers at Quick's sawmill in Frenchman's Bend are all black. At least, when Isham Quick describes Fentry's arrival at the mill in "Tomorrow," he says he did "the same work" and drew "the same pay as the niggers done" (103). (In the larger Yoknapatawpha context, this is an exception to the usual absence of Negroes, except for a few domestic servants, in the Frenchman's Bend area.)

In The Town this man works with Eck Snopes at a logging mill. Gavin Stevens calls him "one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecilic" in describing his and Eck's disastrous attempt to set "a tremendous cypress log . . . onto the saw-carriage" (33).

There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190).

In The Town, these two men carry the medallion of Eula across the railroad platform to Gavin's car.

Although they are unseen in The Town, Charles knows there are "pullman porters" on the train that arrives in Jefferson in Chapter 24 (377). Shortly after the Civil War a white man named George Pullman designed the original sleeper cars for passenger trains, and hired blacks, in many cases former slaves, to serve as the attendants in those cars.

The principal of Jefferson's Negro school in The Mansion is a "college-bred man" and, according to Gavin Stevens, a person "of intelligence and devotion too" (247). In his role as narrator of Chapter 9, Charles Mallison seconds Gavin's words, describing the principal as an "intelligent dedicated man with [a] composed and tragic face" (248). Along with the school's "senior woman teacher," he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247).

In The Sound and the Fury this man is the regular preacher at the Negro church in Jefferson. Though he does not give the Easter sermon, he enters the church with Reverend Shegog and is described in sharp contrast to the "undersized" visiting clergyman: he is "huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat. His head is magisterial and profound, his neck rolled above his collar in rich folds" (293).

This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191).

In The Hamlet this man takes care of cleaning and keeping fires lit at the Savoy Hotel, where Mink's wife works while Mink is awaiting trial (288).

Light in August never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this Character to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black.

Perhaps as another symptom of the "newness" of the town Horace and Belle move to in Flags in the Dust after her divorce, on his way back from the railroad station he notes that the street is "uptorn . . . in the throes of being paved" (376). The "lines of negroes" doing the work "swing their tools in a languid rhythm," singing "snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations" (376). Since they explicitly work in "lines," this may be a chain gang, and the men may be convict laborers, but that is not said explicitly.

This is the imposing-looking Pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who leads the delegation that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris, requesting him to pay back to the church the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund. The narrator describes him as "a huge, neckless negro in a Prince Albert coat . . . with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye" (282).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this is the "one old woman" among the huge group of self-emancipated slaves crowding toward the river and the Union army; she tries to get a ride on Rosa Millard's wagon so that she can "see the water before she died" (48, 103).

When Popeye's mother gets sick after her husband abandons her in Sanctuary, she goes to this "old negro woman" rather than a doctor, and the woman "tells her what was wrong" (304). The narrator doesn't tell us, but the problem is probably syphilis.

According to the narrator of Light in August, "few of the townspeople" take any notice of the sign in front of Hightower's house (58), but "now and then" an "idle and illiterate" "negro nursemaid with her white charges would loiter" and spell out the letters on it (59).

Although the white people of Jefferson shun Joanna Burden in Light in August, the people of the local black community have close ties with her, as indicated by the footpaths from their cabins to her big house, paths which "radiate from her house like wheelspokes" (257). She "visits them when they are sick," Byron tells Lena, "like they was white" (53).

One of the "three negroes" in Flags in the Dust who accompany Young Bayard on his drunken trip to the neighboring college town to serenade the co-eds. He plays either the bass viol or the guitar.

Sanctuary does not name this man, except as the "murderer" (114) who is awaiting his execution in the jail when Goodwin is locked up there. He killed his wife with a razor. According to another unnamed black character, he is the "bes ba'ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!" His constant singing of "spirituals" and blues songs in jail, accompanied by a "chorus" of other blacks outside the window, provides a kind of soundtrack for the novel's main narrative (114-15).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the Negroes who gather at Mannie's funeral are "the meager clump of [Rider's] kin and friends and a few old people who had known him and his dead wife both since they were born" as well as the men Rider works with at the mill (238, 130).

In Intruder in the Dust this is the man who is "tending" the moonshine still that the Sheriff discovers (228). Claiming to know nothing about it, he takes care of the Sheriff, and the problem, by making him comfortable and offering him a drink or two or more of "water" (228).

This woman is the daughter of one of Jack Houston's father's renters. Jack has a relationship with her. She is "two or three years" his senior (228).

The narrator of Light in August identifies the black man who rides to the Sheriff's house in Jefferson "on a saddleless mule" to report Christmas' violent disruption of the "revival meeting" at "the negro church" only as "the messenger" (322, 323). He is anxious to convince the Sheriff that the blacks had not been "bothering" Christmas beforehand (324).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant, Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). The dreams that feature "negro men" cause her to "wake wide-eyed" (380).

These black men in "A Bear Hunt" were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash.

In The Reivers this man emerges from the crowd to help Luster carry the wounded unnamed black girl to Dr. Peabody's office.

This is the Negro in Light in August whom Sheriff Kennedy forces to talk about the situation at the Burden place. At first the man pleads ignorance but then, after being whipped by the deputy, says "It's two white man" who have been living there (293). He tells the Sheriff that he doesn't live nearby, but "down the road" (292).

In The Reivers Lucius notes that Everbe "has a nurse" to help her take care of her newborn son (298).

In Sanctuary Ruby mentions the various black maids to whom she used to give nightdresses "after one night" wearing them in her work as a prostitute (75).

In "Red Leaves" this enslaved woman travels as a maid with the West Indian woman, Issetibbeha's mother, on her trip from New Orleans to Doom's plantation.

According to the narrator of Requiem for a Nun, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87).

In The Sound and the Fury these women are washing clothes in the creek that runs besides the golf course and the Compson place; "one of them is singing" (14).

In The Mansion, the first man inside the Baptist church every Sunday morning is "the Negro that fired the furnace" (63).

When Chick sees lights in Gavin Stevens' office in Intruder in the Dust, he thinks that sometimes "the janitor forgot to turn them off" (207).

When Sheriff Hampton goes out to investigate Vinson Gowrie's grave in Intruder in the Dust, he takes along two Negro prisoners from the jail to do the digging. Both are dressed in "blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore" (136; in this context "street gangs" are chain gangs or convict work gangs). The narrative makes no effort to distinguish these "two Negroes," as they are repeatedly called (154, 156, 157, etc.). Both are equally anxious about their task, especially when Vinson's father appears.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, the other inmates of the county jail where Rider is being held are described in crude burlesque terms when the deputy sheriff tells his wife how he ordered them to try to restrain Rider in the jailhouse: he calls them "the chain-gang niggers" and describes them as "a big mass of nigger arms and heads and legs boiling around on the floor” (255, 151).

In the "common room" beside the cell holding Cotton in "The Hound" are the men the narrative calls the "minor prisoners": "a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets" who have been jailed for vagrancy, selling whiskey and shooting craps (163). One of them is at the window, "yelling down to someone" outside the jail (163), and one talks to Cotton, telling him to "Hush up, white man," when he starts going into detail about Houston's corpse (164).

While hiding in the stable loft, the servant in "Red Leaves" imagines the scene of the other slaves drumming "three miles away" (329). In his mind he sees "men children" being nursed by the women around the drum circle (329).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin sees this man in Virginia, from the window of the train carrying him back to Yoknapatawpha from Harvard for the holidays. He is sitting patiently on a mule without a saddle, "waiting for the train to move" (86). When Quentin calls out "Christmas gift!" to him, he replies, "Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you" (87). To Quentin, he seems "like a sign put there saying You are home again" in the South (87).

In the old days described by Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun," the husbands of the town's Negro laundresses sometimes "fetch and deliver" the clothes their wives have washed (290).