Character Keys

In The Town this man works for the Sartoris family and drives a horse-drawn carriage rather than a car. He is holding the reins when Mr. Buffaloe drives his homemade automobile "into the square at the moment when Colonel Sartoris the banker's surrey and blooded matched team were crossing it on the way home" (12).

This is the man who drives Mrs. Compson out to the Sartoris place in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished.

In "Knight's Gambit" the "Negro butler" at the Harriss plantation opens the door to Gavin Stevens and Charles Mallison and "immediately vanishes" (249).

In Flags in the Dust the black man in whose barn Bayard spends Christmas eve tells him that his "brudder-in-law" borrowed his mules, and so Bayard will have to wait for a ride to the next town (365). When the mules "miraculously" appear later on Christmas day, the narrator refers to the "yet uncorporeal brother-in-law" (366) - seeming to imply that the Negro invented him.

In Absalom! Rosa Coldfield orders "casual negro boys who happened to pass the house" to "rake her yard" (171-72); they understand that they will be paid later by Judge Benbow.

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.

In Absalom! this is the "negro boy" who is playing with Bon's son "outside the gates" at Sutpen's when Clytemnestra drives him away (158).

In Light in August Christmas runs into this boy when he first arrives in the county. "Swinging a tin bucket," "barefoot," and wearing "faded, patched, scant overalls" (227, 228), he answers Christmas' questions by telling him "where Miz Burden stay at" and that "colored folks around here looks after her" (227). As he walks away, he sings a risque song.

In Flags in the Dust "one of the grandsons" of the patriarchal Negro who owns the molasses mill feeds the cane into it and "roll[s] his eyes covertly" at Bayard and Narcissa as they watch the process (288).

In Light in August this bootblack works in the Mottstown barber shop where Christmas gets a shave. The barbershop is identified as "a white barbership," but in that context the adjective refers to the patrons it serves (349). The race of the bootblack is not specified, but since the job he performs, shining shoes, is typically done in Faulkner's fiction by blacks, we have identified his race as "Black." This bootblack notices that Joe is wearing "second hand brogans that are too big for him" (349).

Neither the Negro man whom Boon shoots in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses nor the cause of the quarrel between the men is explained. In "Lion" Quentin describes the man in terms that, like the entire episode, will make a 21st century sensibility wince: "They said he was a bad nigger, but I don't know" (189). When the scene was revised for the novel, the third-person narrator calls him a "negro" instead (223). In both texts this man is armed with "a dollar-and-a-half mail order pistol" that misfires (189, 223).

In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," this woman lives in Vicksburg with her family, and was willing to take in her niece after her father's death. When this niece tells Ike McCaslin that her aunt "took in washing," he suddenly realizes the racial nature of the "effluvium" her niece brings with her (278, 277). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, the women who wash clothes are always Negroes.

In The Sound and the Fury Jason questions this man he encounters at "the forks" where two roads diverge about which way the Ford carrying Quentin and the man in the red tie went (238).

One of the three black men in Flags in the Dust (the others are Richard, and an unnamed "half-grown negro boy") who live with the MacCallums, presumably as servants or tenant farmers, or he may be the "negro who assists" Henry make moonshine whiskey (335).

Trying to buy ammunition to kill Houston in The Mansion, Mink claims that this unnamed black man saw a bear's footprint at Blackwater Slough.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this soldier, "a hulking giant of an Arkansas Negro cotton-field hand" in civilian life (134, 339), heroically rescues Devries and a sergeant by carrying them both away from enemy fire. Devries (unofficially) recognizes his heroism by pinning one of his own medals on the man. We can hear affection and admiration in Devries' voice when he addresses the man who saved him as "you big bastard"; the narrator's tone when he persists in calling this soldier a "field hand" is harder to interpret (134, 340).

In "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, "one Negro in the county" was murdered and burned in his cabin by Grumby's Independents (93, 149).

While "running" away from the Choctaw plantation in "Red Leaves," the servant encounters this "motionless" man, "another Negro" (331). They exchange glances.

The Negro who gives Christmas a ride into Mottstown in Light in August tells him that he is going there to pick up "a yellin calf" that "pappy bought" (339). "Yellin" almost certainly means 'yearling,' and "pappy" presumably means 'father.'

In The Town the Jefferson hotel porter named Samson works with someone whom Ratliff refers to as "Samson's least boy," whose one action in the novel is carrying a newspaper for the white bondsman when he leaves the hotel (103). It's not clear what "least boy" means - perhaps he is a bellboy at the hotel or possibly he is Samson's youngest son.

"Negress" is not a term the narrator of Flags in the Dust uses for any other female Negro, so it's not clear why he uses it the one time he mentions the black maid at the Beard boarding house. She is helping Mrs. Beard serve breakfast at the boarding house. She is also described as "slatternly" (324).

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).

The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" remains unnamed. (When Faulkner develops the episode in The Town, Chick Mallison retells the story as he heard it from his cousin Gowan.) This narrator, like that of "A Rose for Emily," refers to himself in the first-person plural, "we believed," "our ears," etc. (149, 150), and serves as a kind of communal voice for "our town" (149); but he also occupies a privileged narrative position as one of four people who know what the water tower means to Flem Snopes, "that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all" (149).

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 unnamed narrator of "Ad Astra" served during World War I as an American flying in a British squadron (408). In his only explicit references to himself, he talks about the "pleasant" but tense feeling that precedes the moment "in combat" when "you know something is about to happen" (421). Until the last pages of the story he remains a silent witness to the events, but he reports what the others say and do clearly and without bias.

The narrator in "A Courtship" who tells the story of Ikkemotubbe, David Hogganbeck and Herman Basket's sister tells us very little about himself. It's highly likely that he is male, though that is not definitively said. He is an Indian: his use of "us" to refer to the Chickasaws and his reference to "my father's house" (369) locate him inside Issetibbeha's tribe, as does his diction, for example when he calls the helmsman on the steamboat the "boy slave who turned the wheel" (366) or uses "moons and moons" as a temporal reference (377).

While never seen nor (unlike the band the traveling show brings to Jefferson) even heard, the performer who "can play a tune on a saw" (15) is mentioned or (when Luster spends so much of Easter trying to imitate him) alluded to in all four sections of The Sound and the Fury. He is perhaps the novel's figure of the artist.

These men and women in "Shall Not Perish" visit the museum in Jefferson "without charge" (111). The narrator says they are "people like us from Frenchman's Bend," by which he seems to mean poor farmers and their families, from "our county or beyond our state too" (111).

According to Sheriff Hampton in Intruder in the Dust, Jake Montgomery's Tennessee roadhouse was closed by the police after "a man went and got killed in it one night two-three years ago" (112-13).

If you believe what Bill Terrel says in "Monk," the man he killed seduced his daughter. But the daughter denies this, Terrel's story is not believed by the jury that convicts him of "Manslaughter," and the rest of Faulkner's story supports the idea that it is a lie (55). On the other hand, who this victim really was, or why Terrel killed him - that remains a mystery.

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).

While chasing his niece and his money in the last section of The Sound and the Fury, Jason imagines a scene in which he commandeers someone's team of mules to pull his car from the imagined mud that is trying to stop his pursuit. The team's "owner" whom he strikes down is, of course, like the whole episode, his own invention (306).

According to The Town, I.O. Snopes sells mules to "farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could get, down to some last irreducible figure" (245).

In The Town these "folks are still going home from the second running of the picture show" when they see two strange men in Christian's drugstore (162).

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.

In Sanctuary two of the people in attendance at Red's funeral - "middle-aged women" (246) - are described "weeping quietly," but most seem mainly interested in the free alcohol Gene is providing and in getting the flowers off the crap table so that gambling can resume. They include men in both "dark suits" and "the light, bright shades of spring," and women, the "younger ones" wearing "bright colors" and the older ones "in sober gray and black and navy blue, and glittering with diamonds" (243).

When she imagines herself dead as a way to escape Popeye's sexual assault in Sanctuary, Temple's fantasy includes "all the people sitting around the coffin, saying Dont she look sweet" (219).

After Rodney's death, which the young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is still ignorant of, he sees these "ladies with shawls over their heads" coming to offer their condolences to the family.

After Joe Christmas' arrest in Light in August, the unnamed sheriff of the county that includes Mottstown encourages the crowd outside the jail to respect the law.

In As I Lay Dying, the marshal of Mottson argues with Anse to get him to move the stinking coffin out of town.

Neither Buddy's wife nor her parents appear directly in "The Tall Men." Mr. Gombault notes that Buddy's wife isn't buried in the McCallum family graveyard: "Buddy's wife wanted to be buried with her folks. I reckon she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

In Absalom! Sutpen tells General Compson that his first father-in-law's wife "had been a Spaniard" (203); much later in the novel he tells his son Henry that in fact, as he discovered after marrying, she "was part negro" (283). The Chronology at the end of the novel treats her mixed racial identity as a fact - "Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood" (305) - but the actual novel does not independently confirm it. This woman never appears in the novel herself, apparently having died before Sutpen gets involved with her husband and daughter.

Never named, the woman in Sanctuary who gave birth to Popeye is "the daughter of a boarding house keeper" in Pensacola (302-03). She is already pregnant with him, and carrying the disease (probably syphilis) that will leave her an "invalid" (309), when she marries Popeye's father, a professional strike-breaker whom she has only known for 3 days when they decide to marry. They were married less than 3 weeks when he takes off, leaving her to raise the child who is born with the same disease.

The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his mother "maw" (307). She abandons him and his father two years before the story takes place, when she "took off in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast" for her son (308).

Mrs. Harriss's mother is referred to as her husband’s "own life’s one monogamous love" (150). (Based on other Yoknapatawpha fictions, this woman is Mrs. Backus, but that name is not used in "Knight's Gambit.")

This "woman with hard, bright, metallic city hair and a hard, blonde, city face" comes to Yoknapatawpha in "Monk" when Mrs. Odlethrop's son returns home after a long absence (43). The word "city" in that description suggests she is from Memphis, or someplace similar, but that is not made clear in the story. Nor can we say for sure that she is Monk's mother, though the fact that the infant Monk is seen at the Odlethrops' shortly after she and the son leave - for unknown reasons, though perhaps because Mrs.

In "Red Leaves," "Moketubbe's mother" is introduced as a "comely girl" (320) whom Issetibbeha marries after seeing her at work in a melon patch. She is described as having "broad, solid thighs," a "sound back" and a "serene face" (321). Her race is not specified. Our identification of her as "Black" and "Enslaved" (rather than "Indian" and "Tribal Member") is based on her clothing (a "shift") and the fact that she is engaged in field labor, along with the way seeing her reminds Issetibbeha of his "own mother," with "her Negro blood" (321). But this is an interpretive choice.

The "young woman" in "Red Leaves" whom Doom seduces in New Orleans is first described as the "daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family" (318). She is mainly white, but when her son Issetibbeha remembers her a few pages later, the narrative explicitly refers to "her Negro blood" (321). Given the casualness of the later reference, Faulkner might have expected his readers to read the designation "West Indian" as code for racial mixing in the first description, though that's by no means certain.

Elly's mother lives with her, her husband and especially her mother-in-law in a "biggish house" in Jefferson (208). She is a negligible figure in her daughter's life, though it is her suggestion that Elly drive to Mills City to pick up that mother-in-law that precipitates the story's violent climax.