Character Keys

In The Unvanquished Bayard notes that Mrs. Habersham "took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married" (220), but says nothing more about the minister himself.

In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.

When Light in August describes Christmas walking in Jefferson around 9 p.m. it says that if he'd taken the same route at 7 p.m. he "would have passed people, white and black, going toward the square and the picture show" (i.e. the movies, 114). This is a rare instance in the fictions of people of both races doing the same thing - though of course there were separate "White" and "Colored" seating areas inside the theater.

While "Lawyer" Stevens and Sheriff Hampton seem to take charge of the events in Jefferson in Intruder in the Dust, the narrative does remind readers that the town and county have the usual elected officials. The out-of-town architect who wants to buy the jail door takes his request to "the mayor and the alderman and at last the board of supervisors" (54). And Hampton does say he got the mayor's permission to give the night marshal Monday night off (216).

The unnamed narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" seems to be a captain like Spoomer, who greets him as an equal while the gunnery sergeant stands in recognition of his rank (518). However, he doesn't seem to enforce his rank; the gunnery sergeant who is the source of much of his information has no qualms about discussing the antics of officers Spoomer and Sartoris with him, for example. He is an inventor, a wartime military mail censor, and a casualty of war "trying to get used to a mechanical leg" (512).

The narrator of "Death Drag" describes the unusual appearance in his little town of three barnstormers and the town's reaction to them and their stunts. He identifies himself as one of the town's older citizens, a "groundling," or non-flyer (197). Interestingly enough, the narrator qualifies his identification of Ginsfarb and Jake as Jews: "That is, [the spectators] knew at once that two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves, without being able to say what the difference was" (188).

The twelve-year-old boy who narrates "Race at Morning" is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296).

Although the boy who narrates the story of "Uncle Willy" says very little about himself, he is a recognizable version of other juvenile narrators in Faulkner's fiction, and a way for Faulkner to provide a perspective on both the story's unconventional protagonist and the conventional small-town world of Jefferson. He likes playing baseball with his friends and eating the ice cream that Job makes at Willy's drugstore, is uncomfortable in school, and is willing "to do anything [Willy] asked me to do" (239).

In "That Evening Sun" an unnamed and undescribed Negro tells Nancy that Jesus has returned from Memphis.

This man appears in Young Bayard's thoughts as he derides himself for running away after his grandfather's death in Flags in the Dust: "You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you" (333). The novel elides the event Bayard is remembering, so we don't know anything more about the man.

Neither "Delta Autumn" nor the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses makes clear how many people from Yoknapatawpha are in the hunting party, but at least several of them are black, and are there not to hunt but to serve the white hunters. The text names one, Isham, and singles out another as "the youngest Negro" (274, 335) - they have their own character entries. There is at least one more, because both narratives say that "two of the Negroes" cut firewood for cooking and warmth (272, 327).

The two groups of "customers" who patronize Willy's drugstore in "Uncle Willy" are sharply distinguished by race - and by the kinds of things they buy. This is the group that the narrator refers to as the "niggers" who "buy cards and dice" (226).

This unnamed "Negro boy" is a slave owned by Doctor Holston in "My Grandmother Millard" (675).

In the chapter titled "Was" in Go Down, Moses this enslaved boy on the Beauchamp plantation blows the fox horn announcing dinner time. Cass Edmonds thinks the boy is "about his size" (11).

In The Reivers this "Negro boy" at the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation holds the reins of Zack Edmonds' horse while Edmonds himself is in the house (62).

In The Mansion this "Negro boy on [a] bicycle" is the first person Mink sees when he finally reaches Jefferson (451). He gives Mink directions to Flem Snopes' place.

The Negro chauffeur in Flags in the Dust who offers to fetch Miss Jenny's driver Simon from the kitchen at the Mitchell house is "clad in army o.d. and a pair of linoleum putties" (30). ("O.d." is a military way of saying 'olive drab.')

In Sanctuary this driver gives Popeye's grandmother "half a dollar" after he interprets her demand for it as a new system for paying for groceries (306).

As Ratliff puts it in The Mansion, the "Negro" whom Manfred de Spain hires to drive him as President of the bank wears a "white coat and a showfer's cap" (174).

The Negro children in Yoknapatawpha remain out of sight in Intruder in the Dust along with their parents, but Chick pictures them where they "should have been" on a Monday morning in the county: "in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and wornout automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans" (143).

Light in August does not make clear how many people are in the "negro church" that Christmas enters during his flight across the county, but "the congregation" includes the women who "shriek" at his abrupt entrance (one of whom identifies him as "the devil!" 322), the "deacons" who go up to him and try to talk with him (323), and the "men" who, believing that Christmas is white, hold back Pappy Thompson's grandson Roz to keep him from attacking Christmas after he has struck the seventy-year-old man down (323).

Driving out to the Caledonia cemetery on the Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust, Chick sees only a single Negro: a man plowing one of the fields along the road, "the face black and gleam[ing] with sweat and passionate with effort, tense concentrated and composed" (145). The white boy and the black man look "eye to eye into each other's face before the Negro looks away" (145).

In Go Down, Moses, this girl is a slave on Hubert Beauchamp's plantation. Since she follows Sophonsiba Beauchamp down the stairs, “carrying her fan” (12), it is likely that she is being trained as a house slave or personal slave for Sophonsiba.

According to the brief and ambiguous account in The Mansion, while growing up white and male in Frenchman's Bend Mink Snopes has sex with a least one black girl: the "furious unplanned episodes" with an "almost invisible unwashed Negro girl" in a roadside ditch or the middle of a cotton field (317).

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).

In The Reivers this "uniformed maid" helps serve supper at Colonel Linscomb's (277).

This is the man in Flags in the Dust who provides Byron Snopes with the Ford car in which he flees Yokapatawpha after robbing the bank. He is identified simply as "the negro [Byron] sought," and Byron finds him just off the Square, on a "street occupied by negro stores and barber shops" (272).

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).

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 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).

While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37).

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 Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157).

In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow.

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 "A Justice" Doom and the Chocktaws own a sizable number of black slaves. Four of them are briefly traded - along with the six slaves he has recently won on the steamboat from New Orleans - to two unnamed white men for the grounded riverboat which Doom then has moved by slaves to his plantation.

In Light in August this young man offers Joe a ride to Mottstown. He is from "two counties back yonder," and so presumably not aware of either Joanna's murder or the manhunt for Christmas (339).

In Flags in the Dust the wife of the black farmer in whose barn Bayard spends his last night in Yoknapatawpha feeds him breakfast and dinner on Christmas Day, but she herself is not named or described.

Much to Mink's surprise in The Mansion, this "big Negro woman" (305) is a congregant of Goodyhay's church. Albert explains to Mink that "her son had it too just like she was a white woman" - "it" is never clearly explained, but probably means that this son was killed during World War II (305).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris mentions these people in his letter to Jenny, asking her to "tell [them] hello" (529).

In "Red Leaves" the group that pursues the runaway servant does not include the tribe's old men - or its women and children.

This is the "old negro woman" in Light in August who sits, "smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth," whom Joe Brown calls "Aunty" when he asks her to help him get a message to the sheriff (433-34). At first she refuses, saying that the one black man she knew who "thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him . . . aint never come back" (434).

In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke.

In Absalom!, "whenever anyone white or black stops in the road" to speak to Charles E. S-V. Bon (162), Clytemnestra "drives the passerby on" with a "murmur of vituperation" (162).

These are "the police" who come to the Temples' apartment to arrest Nancy in Requiem for a Nun (153). (Elsewhere Faulkner describes the officers of the law in Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha as sheriffs and deputies and marshals, but not as 'police.')

In his hunt for Joe Christmas in Light in August Sheriff Kennedy is joined by a large posse. There are "thirty or forty" men waiting for the bloodhounds who arrive on the train the day after Joanna's body is discovered (296), and the narrative suggests this same group remains on the trail through the following week.

In The Mansion the guards at Parchman penitentiary are described as "men with shotguns" at the gate, and as "men on horses with shotguns across the pommels" overseeing the inmates as they work in the field (54).

Only one of the prostitutes who work at Miss Reba's in The Mansion, Thelma, is given a name (84). As a group they are imagined, in Montgomery Ward Snopes' narration, "running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that," and also "screaming and fighting and pulling each other's hair" (81). According to Snopes, "so many" of them "came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families" (83).

In Flags in the Dust this is the railroad employee who, once a week, delivers Belle's shrimp to Horace from "the door of the express car" (374-75). He assumes Horace must be using it for bait.