Character Keys

In Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin meets with this man in the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time. He is describe as a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like Ike's father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War (267).

According to Charles in The Town, the people who own stock in the Sartoris bank include some of the most prestigious families in Yoknapatawpha - besides Sartorises, he mentions Major de Spain, Will Varner, "the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham" as well as the Stevenses - and also "a hundred others that were farmers around in the county" (124).

An unnamed banquet guest in The Hamlet, a "fellow neophyte" in the legal profession, invites Labove to Memphis to celebrate their achievement in graduating from law school (130).

Although Emily herself is an Episcopalian, this Baptist minister is "forced" by the "ladies" of Jefferson to pay her a pastoral visit rebuking her and Homer's public behavior; he "never divulges" what happened in when he confronted Emily, but he "refuses to go back" to her house again (126).

According to the account in Requiem for a Nun, this minister offers a prayer as part of the ceremony commissioning Sartoris' regiment at the beginning of the Civil War.

In The Mansion the Baptist minister marries Essie Meadowfill and McKinley Smith (after "washing his hands and putting on his coat and tie," 383), and later performs his "glib and rapid office" when officiates at Flem's funeral (462).

One of the two other barbers in Hawkshaw's shop in "Dry September"; he asks, "You reckon [Will Mayes] really done it to her?" (173).

The town barber in Sanctuary listens silently while Clarence Snopes complains about the "Memphis jew lawyer" who wouldn't pay full price for the information he was trying to sell, then slyly lets Clarence know how little of his story he accepts at face value (266). His open-mindedness identifies this barber with Henry Hawkshaw, the man who owns the Jefferson barber shop in Faulkner's short story "Dry September," published a month before Sanctuary appeared - but the barber in the novel is not named.

In "Knight's Gambit," the Jefferson barber who joins the conversation about Gualdres' blind horse is "a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly" (178).

In The Mansion the "barbers" at the Memphis "barbers' college" that Virgil and Fonzo attend seem to talk about sex a lot (81).

In The Town Ratliff reports that Will Varner had three "mulatto concubines" - the "first Negroes" in Frenchman's Bend, "and for a time the only ones [Varner] would permit there" (289).

She is the mistress of a federal official in Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction, a connection that leads to her brother’s installation as a marshal in Jefferson. She is described in Go Down, Moses as "half-white" (277).

The woman in Go Down, Moses whom Lucas calls a "yellow slut" - that is, she is light-skinned and promiscuous - was (perhaps unofficially) married to and (certainly unofficially) divorced from Oscar, one of the workers on the McCaslin plantation; she came to Jefferson from Memphis, and returned there after Roth Edmonds "voced" them, as Lucas puts it (115).

This is "the officer" in Sanctuary who brings Popeye from Birmingham, where he is arrested, to the "small Alabama town" where he will be tried and convicted (310).

In Flags in the Dust this man sits in front of Rogers' restaurant, "a man of at least forty" who is wearing a motley collection of uniforms and playing a guitar and harmonica (which the narrative calls a "mouthorgan," 118). The narrative describes what he plays as "a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythymic as a mathematical formula but without music" (118). The tin cup at his feet contains "a dime and three pennies" (118).

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this "plump blonde woman" and "a man" get out of a taxi (192). The couple's behavior outside the door causes Fonzo to suck in his breath, and Virgil to assume that they must be married, but while the narrator never says so explicitly, it's clear enough that she is a prostitute and he is one of her customers. She disappears into the house.

These aldermen are elected officials who (along with the town mayor) govern Jefferson. In The Town, the board of aldermen meets to consider Gavin Stevens' complaint against Mayor de Spain. (See also Unnamed Alderman in this index.)

This icon represents the "next generation" of town authorities" in "A Rose for Emily" (120) who lead Jefferson in the early 20th century with their "more modern ideas"; this group includes the "deputation" of Alderman who pay a call on Emily Grierson to tell her that there is no record that her taxes had ever been remitted (120). Their unnamed spokesman is polite but firm, though his courteousness is soundly defeated by her intransigence - and the unwritten chivalric rules that still govern relations between men and ladies.

When in The Mansion Linda Snopes Kohl takes her campaign to improve black schools to "the County Board of Supervisors," they try at first to talk her out of the idea (250); when she persists, they "didn't dare unlock their door while they were in session" and resort to having their lunch snuck in "through the back window" of the meeting room (251).

In the "Appendix" these are the unnamed boarders - "juries and horse- and muletraders" - who live in the Compson house after it has been vacated by the Compsons (331) .

The men who stay at the Beard boarding house are mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Light in August. The first novel describes them as traveling salesmen, jurors from out of town, weather-stranded countrymen, even two "town young bloods" who keep a room as a place for gambling. Besides Byron Snopes, some - bachelors identified as "clerks, mechanics and such" - live there more permanently (104).

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the people who board with Popeye's mother "clients" (304). None are described in any detail, but we know they include some "old ones" and one man who finds two fires in his room. The day after firemen discover Popeye's grandmother with a fire in the attic, "all the clients left" (305).

In "Appendix Compson" the owner of the boardinghouse that used to be the Compson family home is a "countryman," which in this context refers to a rural person as opposed to someone from town (331).

The bondsmen to whom Jason Compson IV refers in the "Appendix" appear to monitor Jason's role as "guardian and trustee" (342). Jason is, presumably, guardian of Caddy's daughter, Quentin Compson, and entrusted with the finances of the Compson estate.

In Light in August the bookkeeper in the office at the planing mill who tells Hightower that Byron has quit his job there also calls Byron a "hillbilly," which suggests he himself might be from town (413).

In The Town, to find out "how a bank was run," Flem Snopes watches the men who "kept the books" at work (147).

In Sanctuary the man who drives the truck carrying the moonshine that Lee Goodwin makes from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis complains about having to wait for Horace, to whom he is giving a ride to Jefferson. "I got a woman waiting for me," he says (21).

This anomalous 'character' does not appear in either the magazine or book versions of "Vendee." But in the typescript for the story Faulkner included a passing reference to the techniques used by "headhunters" in Borneo that Bayard read about and that he and Ringo apparently employ in skinning Grumby after they succeed in killing him (115). In his edition of the story for Uncollected Stories, Joseph Blotner restores this passage to the text, and so the "headhunters" become an entry in our database.

In The Sound and the Fury the bridge over the Charles where Quentin decides to commit suicide is also a place, he learns from the boys he meets there, where "Boston folks" come to fish for the renowned trout who swims under it (119).

One of the three boys carrying fishing poles whom Quentin encounters in The Sound and the Fury is named "Kenny" (122). This is one of the two who are not; Quentin thinks of them as "the first," "the second" and "the third" (117 etc.) and they can be distinguished from each other. This "second" boy, for example, imagines catching the trout and exchanging it for a "horse and wagon" (117) - Quentin refers to him as "the one that thought the horse and wagon back there at the bridge" (137), and he is consistently the most contrary of the three.

In "Death Drag," this boy is afraid to return Mr. Harris' car to him after Ginsfarb skips town without paying for its use in the air show. He seems enterprising enough to take a quarter for returning the car and smart enough to know that Mr. Harris "might get mad" at being cheated (205).

In Light in August, this is the friend who upsets Christmas when he tells him and the other boys who hunt and fish together on Saturday afternoons about sexual intercourse, female desire, and menstruation. He also arranges the meeting in the shed with the Negro girl.

In The Hamlet this fourteen-year-old boy has a "habit" of spying on Will Varner's affair with a tenant's wife; he reveals that "Varner would not even remove his hat" during their trysts (157).

In "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140).

The narrator of The Mansion speculates that Meadowfill might have "haggled or browbeat" a young boy for his .22 rifle (370).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin gets in a fight with this boy when he threatened to put a frog in a girl's desk - or possibly the teacher's desk; she is female too. Quentin tells Mr. Compson, though, that "He was as big as me" (67).

In The Mansion Charles describes how "the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then" (199) and the "eight- and nine- and ten-year old males" (200) regarded the men returning from in World War I with their "wound- and service-stripes" and "medal ribbons" (200).

This ambiguously defined group represents the "one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes" who "sometimes" visit Lee Goodwin after he's been convicted of murder and on some of those times bring him "baskets," presumably containing food (115).

In "Death Drag," these boys are the first to appear at the airfield when the barnstormers land there after having performed a stunt over the town. They are curious about the airplane and the aviators and ask questions that the adults can't or won't. Noticing that "two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves," one asks the "limping man" who turns out to be Ginsfarb, "Were you in the war?" (188). They accompany barnstormers into town, where a boy repeats the question, assuming that the limp is the result of a war injury (192).

This entry represents the boys who appear or are referred to in various passages in The Town. For example, Mink Snopes called out from the jail to passing boys "he could trust would deliver his message" to Flem Snopes (85). "All the boys in town" appreciate Eck Snopes' goodness and the "raw peanuts" he is always willing to share with them (116). "All the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older" enjoy stealing watermelons from Ab Snopes' patch, then watching him rage about the loss (138).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).

The "RFC captain" in World War I who, according to Uncle Gavin in The Mansion, was so young and had "such a record" that the British government sent him home before the end of the war so that "he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority" - i.e. the day he turned twenty-one (232). (The Royal Flying Corps was the original name of the RAF, the better-known Royal Air Force.)

Sartoris drunkenly tries to work off his resentment toward Spoomer in "All the Dead Pilots" by making this corporal - "who was an ex-professional boxer" - wear a captain's uniform and pretend to be "Cap'm Spoomer" while fighting him with his fists (514).

These are the British officers whom Chick refers to in Intruder in the Dust when he reminds his uncle Gavin what he once told him, "about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918" (200).

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

"Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" says that Suratt owns "half of a restaurant" in Jefferson (150). The other half is owned by "his brother-in-law" (141) - which is all we know about this man. (The earlier "Centaur in Brass" said even less about this half-owner. In the later novel The Hamlet this brother-in-law is named Aaron Rideout.)

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" mentions that "the feller wound the door shut and the bus began to hum" (87). He is referring to the driver of the bus that his brother, Pete, is taking to Jefferson on the first leg of his journey to enlist in the U.S. Army.

When Melissa Meek gets there in "Appendix Compson," the bus station in Memphis is filled with "a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions" (337).

In "Centaur in Brass" an unnamed local butcher gives Tom-Tom one of last year's watermelons that has been in cold storage for a year; he is afraid to eat it himself. In giving it to a black man, he joins other white folks in Faulkner's fiction who give black people castoffs with no regard for what happens next.