Character Keys

On her annual visits to Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!, Rosa sees her sister Ellen lying in a darkened room "and a negro woman sitting beside the bed with a fan" (19). She is presumably Ellen's personal maid.

This entry represents either one, two or perhaps as many as three different slaves in the Sutpen mansion mentioned in Absalom!; they play basically the same role, though wear different textual labels: the "servant" who informs Rosa and her father that their buggy is ready to drive them back to town (19), "the nigger" whom Sutpen sends to ask Henry to see him in the library (266), and, after that meeting, the "house nigger" who repacks Henry and Bon's saddlebags and takes them to the stable (266).

Historically, Haitian slavery was abolished and French ownership of land forbidden by law before Sutpen was born. Absalom! represents the people who rise up against the rule of the French sugar planter so symbolically that it is impossible to know if it sees them as enslaved or not, though it's likely that in Faulkner's mind their uprising is a slave rebellion. Before the rebellion they are depicted as the unseen sound of "the drums and the chanting" at night (202), and a "blank wall of black secret faces, a wall behind which almost anything could be preparing to happen" (203).

In Absalom!, this is the "extra" slave on the carriage when Sutpen's wife and daughter travel to Memphis (81). Among his duties is periodically re-heating the bricks that warm the ladies' feet.

In Mr. Compson's account in Absalom! of the place in New Orleans where young women are purchased as sexual slaves, these "old women" serve as their duennas while they await sale (89).

The "wild negro who drives" Sutpen's carriage to church in Absalom! is one of the original twenty who were brought from the Caribbean (16). He has a "perfectly inscrutable" face, and speaks a form of pigdin English ("Marster say; I do," 17)

The Tidewater slave who drives the carriage that almost runs down Sutpen's sister in Absalom! wears "a plug hat"; he orders the "gal" to "git outen de way" (187).

Shreve and Quentin speculate in Absalom! that as an incentive to get Bon to attend the University of Mississippi, the lawyer offers to "buy him an extra special body servant" to take along (250); later they depict this "new extra nigger" unpacking Bon's "fine clothes" in his stateroom on the riverboat taking him to college (252).

In Absalom! Shreve describes the people who shop at the "little crossroads store" that Sutpen opens after the Civil War as "a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash)" (147). As at other country stores in Faulkner's world, there are often "lounging men" on the front porch, but here the "customers and loungers" are racially mixed: "rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes" (149), "the black and the white" (227).

The "County Medical Officer" in Absalom! tells General Compson that Charles E. S-V. Bon and Judith Sutpen have yellow fever (170).

Several real Confederate officers are mentioned by name in Absalom!. They have their own entries. This entry represents the larger, anonymous group of men who lead the Confederate Army through the Civil War. Like so many other characters in the novel, they are seen differently from different points of view. In Chapter 1, to Rosa Coldfield, who writes "poems, ode eulogy and epitaph" to many of them, they are "a few figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" (13).

This is the "someone else" in Absalom! who, Rosa says, was "kind enough" to tell her Sutpen was dead (139).

This is the second of the two sets of "half-breed servants" on the Haitian plantation in Absalom! (199).

The son Sutpen wants is only one of the two boys at the heart of his "design" in Absalom!. The other is referred to as "the boy-symbol at the door," another poor white child like the boy he himself once was in Tidewater, an "amazed and desperate child" whom he will take inside the front door of his big mansion and so "rive forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were" (210).

In Absalom! Jim Hamblett is the "justice" in the courthouse when Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned for fighting at the "negro ball" (164). In the middle of scolding the prisoner as "a white man" for stirring up racial ill-will at the time that the South seeks "to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor," he suddenly stops to ask the prisoner: "What are you?" (165).

Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first.

Goodhue Coldfield's grandfather never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen by noting that her father knew "who his grandfather had been in Virginia" (11).

In Absalom!, Rosa's "spinster aunt" (46) lives with the Coldfields in Jefferson and, after Rosa's mother dies, raises the girl. According to Mr. Compson, this aunt is "that strong vindictive consistent woman who seems to have been twice the man that Mr. Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa's mother but her father too" (49). "A virgin at thirty-five," when Rosa is born, she brings Rosa up in a "closed masonry of females," defined by rage against "the entire male principle" in general and Thomas Sutpen in particular - at least according to Mr.

In Absalom! Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner. Beardsley's name is also mentioned in Light in August.

The "old Abraham full of years" to whom Shreve compares Sutpen in Absalom! is obviously the Old Testament patriarch (260). That figure is best known as the mythic father of the covenant between God and His chosen people, and as the human father whose faith was so great that he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God's command. Shreve's "Abraham," however, seems entirely his own invention, who - in a quotation that sounds biblical but that Shreve makes up - "raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions" (260).

In the last decades of his career Faulkner several times creates lists of the major family names in various parts of Yoknapatawpha. In Intruder in the Dust he identifies five family names with Frenchman's Bend and its environs: Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright (146).

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet, these "neighbor men" are in the habit of dropping by to see what kind of horse Pap (in the short story) or Ab Snopes (in the novel) has "brung home this time" (119) - or "whatever it was he had done swapped for" (34). It's likely that at least most of these men are tenant farmers on the Holland land too.

One of many of Faulkner's "boy" narrators, this twelve-year-old son of tenant farmers is more probably an adult when he tells this story about how Pat Stamper bested both his "Pap" and "Mammy." Although he is a sympathetic companion to his father, he is also a careful reporter and analyst of Pap's behavior. At least from his older perspective, he can see Pap's weaknesses for horse- and mule-trading, and for alcohol as well.

In "Lion," Boon Hogganbeck "busts past the doctor's wife when she opened the door" (196), demanding that the doctor go to the hunting camp to save the wounded Lion.

In "Lion," Quentin invokes the mystical powers of nameless Polynesian chiefs (who were looked upon as being "both more and less than men," 186) to show how absolute is Lion's rule over the other dogs in the hunting camp.

Hoke's is "a sawmill and a few stores" (188), apparently populated almost entirely by men. In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses most of these "wear muddy boots and khaki," indicating their status as mill workers (188, 218). The next day some "people from Hoke's" (189), called "sawmill men from Hoke's" in the novel (224), show up at the hunting camp, to participate in the hunt for Old Ben. Afterwards, they also bear witness to Lion's passing.

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses this "man in uniform" (the story, 188) or "man in a uniform cap" (the novel, 222) approaches Boon in the washroom at the station in Memphis to tell him he he can't drink there, but in both texts, after looking "at Boon's face," he decides to say nothing. The cap suggests he may be a porter, in which case he'd be a Negro, but that isn't made explicit.

Born William Harrison Dempsey, "Jack" Dempsey was World Heavyweight boxing champion form 1921 to 1926 when he lost his title to Gene Tunney. His name is used in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses along with three other famous heavyweight boxers to measure how highly the hunters of Yoknapatawpha regard the dog Lion and the bear Old Ben as heavyweights and champions too.

Born John Joseph Killion in Greenpoint, New York, he took the professional name of "Jake Kilrain" to protect his parents from the embarrassment of his questionable career as a prize fighter. He lost the heavy-weight championship to John L. Sullivan in a bare-knuckle fight that went 75 rounds in Richbourg, Mississippi, on August 7, 1889.

Job Wylie was probably born a slave, owned by the man he still calls "Marse Hoke Christian" (233). He has worked in the Christian family drugstore ever since it opened "in eighteen-fifty-something," and in the present also works as Willy Christian's cook and housekeeper (226). Job is very loyal to the Christian family, though according to the narrator of "Uncle Willy" he also embodies Jefferson's "timid clinging to dull and rule-ridden-breathing" (239).

Willy Christian's sister in "Uncle Willy" was, like him, born in Jefferson, but she "married an oil millionaire" and now lives in Texas (225). She feels enough concern for her brother's morphine addiction to return to Jefferson on one occasion, and for her family's local reputation to pay the woman Willy marries to leave town on a subsequent occasion.

These are the adult men in "Hair" who attend "Mr. Miller's men's Bible class" at Reverend Schultz's church; they do not seem to play any role in the church's campaign to reform Willy (228).

In "Uncle Willy" these "folks in wagons and walking" on the road in Renfro stop to watch when they reach the pasture where Secretary is trying to teach Willy how to fly the plane (244). Since Secretary is black and Willy is white, the spectators' own race presumably affects the way they see this unusual sight, but the story says nothing to indicate what that is.

The "Mamma" of the narrator of "Uncle Willy" appears in the text only as the person Mrs. Merridew phones to complain about Willy's new wife (236). Her son does not describe her own reaction to Mrs. Merridew's rage.

Although the narrator of "Uncle Willy" has a particularly close relationship with Willy, he is also one of the group of twelve- to fourteen-year-old "boys" who "see a lot" of Willy, in two very different contexts (226). They stop by his drugstore after their baseball games, where he feeds them ice cream while listening to their accounts of the games, and they watch him inject morphine; he joins them in church as a member of Mr. Barbour's Sunday School class for boys.

In "Uncle Willy" Secretary is the name of the "negro boy" whom Willy hires to drive his car (235). In Faulkner's South, even adult black men are often called "boys" by white people, so although the juvenile narrator says that Secretary is "about my size" (235), he also says that Secretary is "older than me" (241) - though we have no way to know how much older. Both the narrator and Willy describe Secretary as "burr-headed," i.e. with short, bristly hair (235).

Reverend Schultz is "the minister" of the Protestant church that both the narrator and title character of "Uncle Willy" attend (227). Along with Mrs. Merridew, he leads the campaign to "cure" Willy of his addictions (232). The narrator, who admires Willy Christian but not the town's 'Christians,' describes Schultz in the Sunday school class for adult men this way: "sitting in the middle of them . . . like he was just a plain man like the rest of them yet kind of bulging out from among the others like he didn't have to move or speak them reminded that he wasn't a plain man" (228).

"Brother Miller" leads the adult men's Bible study class at the Protestant church that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" attends (227). In his case, "Brother" is a ceremonial title, reflecting his place in the church fellowship. Willy reluctantly leaves the boys' class in Sunday school to sit in with the "men" (227).

In "Uncle Willy" Mrs. Hovis is among the ladies who try to reform the title character. She alternates with Mrs. Merridew in staying with Willy "day and night" for three days as part of the plan to keep him away from morphine (229). It seems likely that, like Merridew, she is a member of Reverend Schultz's congregation.

In "Uncle Willy" Hoke Christian first opened the drugstore that his son Willy still owns before the Civil War. He seems to have been a much more exemplary member of the community than Willy, but it's hard to determine his class. In addition to his business, he owned at least one slave, Job, and slave-owning is a characteristic of Yoknapatawpha's upper class families. Talking about Willy, Mrs. Merridew refers to "that position in the world which his family's name entitled him to" (232). But Mrs.

The Memphis man whom the narrator of "Uncle Willy" identifies as "Captain Bean at the airport" refuses to teach Willy how to fly without a certificate from a doctor but is willing to teach Secretary, Willy's black driver - which seems to flaunt the rules of segregation (241). His title suggests he may be an ex-World War I aviator, like many other flyers in Faulkner's fictions, but that is conjecture.

In "Uncle Willy" Mr. Barbour is the narrator's Sunday school teacher at the Protestant church. He is apparently willing to let Willy sit in on the class, but he never calls on him.

The man with the badge outside Grandpa's house in Mottstown in "That Will Be Fine" reminds Georgie of "Mr. Watts at Jefferson that catches the niggers," so it seems safe to say that Watts is either the sheriff or one of the deputies or, perhaps, the town marshal (277). The fact that all the people he catches are black probably reflects the fact that most arrested people in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha are black, not that Watts has a special commission to catch Negroes.

These are the Mottstown men who carry Rodney's body to his father's house in "That Will Be Fine"; Georgie says, "I could look back and see the six men in the moonlight carrying the blind with the bundle on it" (286).

This is the "other lady in Mottstown" who - according to the account of the very young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" - had "business" with Rodney, though "just one time" (268). "Business" is the term Rodney gave his young nephew; a less naive narrator would say 'sex.' "Lady" is the term that his culture taught this youngster to use for most white women; another narrator might use a different word here too.

He is the husband of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquest, Mrs. Tucker. Rodney makes clear to Georgie, the very young and uncomprehending narrator of "That Will Be Fine," that Mr. Tucker is not involved in his "business" with Mrs. Tucker (266).

In "That Will Be Fine," John Paul is the servant who drives the hack for Georgie's family and is willing to speak sarcastically about Uncle Rodney's behavior. He is observant and witty: "John Paul said he bet papa would like to give Uncle Rodney a present without even waiting for Christmas . . . a job of work"; "John Paul quit laughing and said Sho, he reckoned anything a man kept at all the time, night and day both, he would call it work no matter how much fun it started out to be" (270).

Mrs. Jordon is Grandpa's Mottstown neighbor in "That Will Be Fine"; at the end of the story, after Rodney is killed, Rosie is taking Georgie to her house for the night.

The "grandpa" of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is married to grandma, and the father of Louisa, Sarah, and Rodney. He knows his son is a criminal but covers for him as long as possible, apparently taking refuge or solace in anger and his "tonic," which he keeps in a bottle in his desk - a desk which Rodney knows how to "prize open" in order to sneak his own (alcoholic) "dose" (266).