Character Keys

This young black was Hoake McCarron's sole companion growing up. Many of Faulkner's wealthier white men had Negro companions and personal servants as boys; the way this kind of relationship plays out in The Hamlet is atypical, to say the least. When the boys are 6-8 years old, Hoake "conquers the negro with his fists in a fair fight" (150). Later he "pays the negro" at a fixed rate "for the privilege of whipping [him] . . . with a miniature riding crop" (151).

In The Hamlet Will Varner mentions that his "mammy" once heard an old woman explain that the way a pregnant woman can make sure she has a girl is to "show her belly to the full moon" (339). "Mammy" often implies a black woman, but in this case it seems more likely that Will is talking about his own mother. (The word occurs in a passage thick with his rural vernacular: "I mind me when" "done married and moved," "passel of boys," etc.; 339.)

In The Hamlet there are always groups of men hanging around Frenchman's Bend's more public spaces, like Varner's various businesses or Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house. Some members appear somewhat individualized, such as with the "man with the peach spray" (343) who discusses the horse auction and its consequences with a "second" and a "third" among the group at Varner's store, although each remains virtually indistinct, members of a communal group who interact with well-defined characters like Varner, Ratliff, Quick, Bookwright, Freeman and the various Snopeses.

These men are sitting on the store porch when Ab and Ratliff drive past in The Hamlet; they may have been the ones who told Ab that "Pat Stamper was in Jefferson that day" (38).

In The Hamlet this doctor operates upon V.K. Ratliff, cutting the "right thing out whether by accident or design" (80).

In The Hamlet Ratliff asks this man in Columbia, Tennessee, about "the whereabouts of his [Ratliff's] cousin," and sells him a sewing machine (61).

Following Labove's admission to the Bar in The Hamlet, these men are present at the celebration for the graduating class in a hotel dining room.

Part of the time Ratliff is away from Yoknapatawpha in The Hamlet is spent selling sewing machines in Tennessee; there he spends time with "a distant kinsman" - i.e. someone to whom he is distantly related - who owes him money (61).

The man in The Hamlet who makes a joke accusing Mink Snopes' wife of prostitution is described as "a town wit" (289).

This teacher at the "agricultural college" that Labove briefly attends lurks inside the way The Hamlet describes the woman with whom Labove has an affair as "the wife of a minor instructor" (151).

These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers.

In The Town this man is hired by I.O. Snopes to lead the newly arrived mules from the depot to the lot near Mrs Hait's home.

This is the "doctor or officer" - Labove, who witnesses the event in The Hamlet, "does not know" which - who attends to a dying Negro who has been shot at on "a bleak station platform" at an unnamed location (138).

This is the woman whom The Hamlet refers to as the "curl-papered landlady" in El Paso who tries to prevent Jack Houston from taking the woman who becomes his common law wife away from her house - but since the woman is a prostitute and the place the landlady runs is a brothel, it seems clear that "landlady" is a euphemism for 'madam' (234).

After Houston returns to Yoknapatawpha in The Hamlet, he sometimes meets the "contemporaries" who remember him from the "youth" they shared, with whom he still occasionally gets together for "drinks or cards" (237).

In The Hamlet Labove joins the university's football team; none of his teammates are individualized.

These "federal officers" would usually be called 'revenuers' (5). According to The Hamlet, as the Old Frenchman's original plantation falls into decay after the Civil War, the area that becomes known as Frenchman's Bend transforms into an enclosed back country effectively outside the reach of government authorities.

The father of Eck Snopes' first wife is unnamed, despite the fact that his "name" figures in The Hamlet. This needs explaining, and the text does try to do that. Eck's (also unnamed) wife dies sometime after the child is born, and her mother, according to Eck, began calling him "after his grandpa" - that is, presumably, her husband (295). But (as Eck 'explains') "he never had no actual name," and we never learn what his grandmother called him (295). (This is the child who eventually gets called "Wallstreet Panic Snopes.")

In The Hamlet the father of one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who courted Eula before her marriage eventually sells his son's neglected buggy to a "negro farm-hand" (165).

This good Samaritan in The Hamlet brings Eula home after the salesman who has been courting her took her to a dance in "a schoolhouse about eight miles away" - "and vanished" (147).

In The Hamlet this drover tells Alison Hoake McCarron of her husband's death (150). A "drover" is someone who drives herds of cattle, from pasture to pasture or from farm to market, and so on.

This "resident of the village" of Frenchman's Bend is the first of many men, white and black, to whom Flem Snopes lends money in The Hamlet (67).

In the fantasy of Flem in hell in The Hamlet, these minions - the text refers to them only as "they" and "them" (166) - carry messages between their master and Snopes. One of them is individualized as an "old fellow" who "used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy" (168), but none of them are described. The dialect in which they speak is one that is conventionally associated with the lower class and the rural south: Flem's soul, they say, "wasn't no big one to begin with nohow" (166).

In The Hamlet this distant kinsman's wife's cousin puts Ratliff up for the night and buys a sewing machine from him.

These are the "spectators" in The Hamlet who show up to watch the legal proceedings that result from the "Texas Sickness" - the auction of the wild ponies and its aftermath. They are described as "the men, the women, the children, sober, attentive, and neat, not in their Sunday clothes to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that morning" (356).

According to the narrator of The Hamlet, "county officers do not bother [the people of Frenchman's Bend] at all save in the heel of election years" (5). The reference is to 'peace officers,' i.e. policemen, though in Yoknapatawpha the term 'police' is rarely used to describe the county's sheriffs and deputies or the marshals in the town. The county sheriffs all are elected, which explains the last part of that quotation, but in fact the novel shows them doing their job in Frenchman's Bend, at least when Houston is murdered.

As the Sheriff and his deputies take Mink to jail in The Hamlet, they see "cotton pickers" working the fields around Whiteleaf store (283); though they are not described, it's likely that the pickers are black.

The University of Mississippi "classics professor" for whom Labove did menial work in The Hamlet rewarded him with "an original Horace and a Thucydides" (122).

In The Hamlet Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

The brother-in-law of Labove's Oxford landlady in The Hamlet gives her sweet potatoes as a treat.

In The Hamlet this apprentice helps Trumbull and Varner's blacksmith overhaul the machinery of the cotton gin (65).

In The Hamlet these men oversee the convict laborers at the logging camp (262).

This is the group in The Hamlet whom Lump Snopes refers to as "a few of the boys" (258). They don't appear directly in the narrative, but Lump tells Mink his plan to take these young white men one night to the home of the Negro who found Mink's shotgun, and terrify him "with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet" in order to force him to admit, falsely, that he stole the gun (258).

Although the narrator of The Hamlet calls the Varner's cook the "only servant of any sort in the whole district" (11), the Varner's also have a manservant. Among his jobs is carrying Eula "until she was five or six": "the negro man staggering slightly beneath his long, dangling, already indisputably female burden" (106).

In The Hamlet Ratliff's father was a tenant farmer who at one time worked on land owned by "old man Anse Holland" next to parcel that Ab Snopes was sharecropping on (29).

In The Hamlet Faulkner's imagination takes one of its most amazing flights (or perhaps descents) when he describes Flem Snopes meeting the fallen angels in Hell. Among them is this "pa" of the Prince of Darkness, and so presumably Satan himself - though Faulkner's cosmology is by no means clear (168).

The Frenchman's Bend planter who appears in The Hamlet is elsewhere identified as Louis Grenier. His family is distinguished by the way it has disappeared completely in the years after the South lost the Civil War: "he was gone now, . . . the Frenchman, with his family" (4). In one scene late in the novel the life of the white ladies and gentlemen on the old plantation is conjured up, but there too the novel notes that "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

Labove's sister, the only one of his five younger siblings to be individualized, is "about ten" years old in The Hamlet; like everyone in the family, she likes to wear the football cleats he brings home (114).

Labove's "incredibly old" great-grandmother in The Hamlet smokes "a foul little clay pipe" and likes wearing the football cleats he sends home because of the sound they make (114).

Alison Hoake buries her husband in a family graveyard "beside her father and mother" (150). This is the only mention of Mrs. Hoake in The Hamlet.

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

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).

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.

In "Hand upon the Waters" Boyd Ballenbaugh "was subdued and thrown into jail once by two officers in Jefferson" (76).

In "Hand upon the Waters" this agent for the insurance company that issued the policy on Lonnie's life willingly follows Gavin Stevens’s instructions to help capture his killer.

In "Hand upon the Waters" Nate is a Negro farmer who lives in a cabin near the path to Lonnie's camp, and the owner of the "Negro voice" that "answers" Stevens when he asks him to let people at the nearby store know if he, Stevens, isn't "back by daylight" (79). In response to his wife's misgivings, Nate "murmurs something" - but readers never hear what Nate himself says, either to Stevens or to her (80).

One of the four men - the others are Ike, Pose, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters."

According to "Hand upon the Waters," "the last of the Holston family" - one of the three first (white) families in Yoknapatawpha - died "before the end of the last century," i.e. sometime before 1900 (70). This story does not connect the family to the Holston House, the Jefferson hotel that survives into the 20th century. This contradicts the account of the family provided in The Mansion, one of Faulkner's last novels.

In "Hand upon the Waters," Tyler Ballenbaugh is "a farmer, married and with a family and a reputation for self-sufficiency and violence," and for having won large "sums" as a gambler (75). That reputation returns with him from the time he spent "out West" (75). After his return to Yoknapatawpha, he continues to gamble, by speculating in "cotton futures" and even betting on Lonnie's Grinnup's life expectancy (75). He is cool and levelheaded in comparison with his younger brother.