Character Keys

In The Unvanquished Mr. Habersham works in a "little dim hole" in a bank (220). He obeys his wife's command and signs John Sartoris' peace bond. (The Habersham family figures in Faulkner's fiction among the founders of Yoknapatawpha, but the married couple in this novel are not specifically associated with that larger narrative.)

In The Unvanquished - in a passage added to the original story "Raid" - Ringo sleeps in "Missy Lena's cabin" at Hawkhurst; she is undoubtedly a slave on the plantation, but does not appear in the novel herself (99). If her name was given her by the whites who owned her, as was probably the case, Missy Lena is likely a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; in Faulkner's fiction as in southern history, slave names were often a mock-heroic version of classical ones.

John Hunt Morgan commanded a cavalry regiment in the western theater of the Civil War, and, like Nathan Bedford Forrest, was known for his raids behind Yankee lines. His 1863 raid into southern Indiana and Ohio was the furthest Confederate penetration of the North. In The Unvanquished, among "the names" that Bayard and Ringo hear John Sartoris mention as he talks about the war is "Morgan" (15).

In The Unvanquished this is the group that Aunt Jenny refers to "us" and "we": her fellow Charlestonians during the War who, like herself, admired the efforts of the English blockade runner to break through the Union naval blockade, and so helped alleviate their sufferings during under the constrained wartime conditions, the time when "we had all forgot what money was, what you could do with it" (244).

These "countrymen" - inhabitants of the countryside around Jefferson rather than town residents - don't appear directly in The Unvanquished, but they have left mark on the "wooden steps scuffed by the heavy bewildered boots" when they come into town to consult Ben Redmond in his law office (248); the fact that they are "bewildered" suggests their class status, and seems also intended to say something about Redmond's practice.

Aunt Jenny tells Bayard about this "Englishman" among the blockade runners she knew in Charleston during the Civil War: "He must have been a gentleman once or associated with gentlemen" (244). For most of the Civil War the Union Navy blockaded the ports of the Confederate states, including Charleston, South Carolina. "Blockade runners" were sailors who snuck their ships past the Union ships to bring supplies to the South. This unnamed English seaman was presumably an officer. His smuggling, although motivated by money, made him a hero to Aunt Jenny and her peers.

In The Unvanquished this man lives with his family in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" outside Jefferson (221). He served under John Sartoris in his first regiment. After the war Sartoris shoots and kills him, because he thinks (perhaps wrongly) that the man plans to rob him.

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished these are the people who live in the various "houses on the road" to Memphis; "at least once a day" Granny, Bayard and Ringo stop to eat with them (23, 55).

These are the various "watchers - the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not" (96) - who assemble near Hawkhurst to witness the contest between a Confederate and a Union locomotive described by Drusilla Hawk. Drusilla implies that many of these spectators were part of a "grapevine" of oppressed and deprived people who knew of the raid before it happened (97).

This is the "band" that plays in The Unvanquished when Colonel Sartoris drives the first train on the newly finished track into Jefferson (226).

In "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished the Yankee lieutenant whose men have damaged the mule pen fence while re-possessing the livestock Rosa stole gives her a voucher worth $10 drawn "on the quartermaster at Memphis" (91, 145). A military quartermaster is in charge of providing supplies to the forces.

In The Unvanquished Bayard twice mentions the "workmen" (225) who build Colonel Sartoris' railroad line to Jefferson. He pays them on "Saturdays" (220).

In The Unvanquished the son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins' was killed in "almost the last battle" of the Civil War, which would have been sometime in 1865 (214). When he died, he was about the same age as Bayard is in "An Odor of Verbena."

In an event added to "Raid" in the novel The Unvanquished, Drusilla Hawk recounts a dramatic contest, "like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time," between two trains, one manned by Confederates and the other in pursuit, manned by these Union forces (98). Drusilla labels the train itself "the Yankee one," does not describe the men who are driving it (96).

In The Unvanquished, when Bayard first rides into town on his way to confront Redmond, these "women" are the only people he sees on the street, he assumes because it was "long past breakfast and not yet noon" (245). These women recognize Bayard and "stopped sudden and dead" when they realize his potentially fatal errand (245).

In The Unvanquished Jed White is a Civil War veteran, a member of Colonel Sartoris' troop who declares his willingness to serve the new Sartoris - Bayard - in a quest to restore his family's honor after the Colonel's murder.

In The Unvanquished Professor Wilkins is teaching and boarding Bayard Sartoris while Bayard pursues a law degree. He seems to have grown fond of Bayard and calls him "my son" when he has to deliver the sad news about Bayard's father's murder (212). Professor and student have had conversations about the principles of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, particularly "Thou shalt not kill." He is afraid that Bayard is contemplating breaking it as he "believed he was touching [Bayard's] flesh which might not be alive tomorrow" (216). Bayard refers to him as "Judge Wilkins" (212).

According to Aunt Jenny's story in Flags in the Dust, Allan is the Confederate officer who reminds General J.E.B. Stuart of his duty to the army in order to keep him from following Carolina Bayard on his reckless quest for anchovies.

In Flags in the Dust Doctor Brandt is the Memphis medical specialist to whom Dr. Alford refers Old Bayard. When Bayard's wen falls off, thanks to Will Falls' folk remedy, in Brandt's waiting room, the doctor sends him a bill for $50.

"Hal Wagner" is one of the two characters whom Byron Snopes invents in Flags in the Dust in his attempt to deceive Virgil Beard about the nature of the anonymous letters he is sending Narcissa (109).

In Flags in the Dust Eunice is the Benbows' cook. She expresses a sort of maternal concern about Horace's welfare. Narcissa tells her that "Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours" (309).

In Flags in the Dust Fothergill is a member of Colonel John Sartoris' irregular unit, with a special ability to get behind Union lines and come back with at least one horse. He and the Colonel are horse racing when Sartoris surprises and captures the company of Yankee cavalry.

In Flags in the Dust Gratton is a short-tempered veteran of World War I, introduced by Eustace Graham as a man who was "up on the British front last spring" (125). The narrator refers to him as "the stranger," meaning that he is not from Yoknapatawpha (125)..

In Flags in the Dust he is one of the blacks who sharecrops on the Sartoris estate; he does not appear in the novel, but the possum hunt that Bayard and Narcissa go on with Caspey and Isom begins behind his cabin.

In Flags in the Dust Hub is the young farmer who provides the illegal moonshine that fuels the road trip Young Bayard takes to Oxford. He is married, and has a sister or a daughter named Sue, but his character seems summed up when he tells Suratt that he "dont give a damn" if anyone tells where the whiskey came from (138). He is clearly a different character from any of the "Hub Hampton"s who are county sheriffs.

Pappy's son, the "younger" of the two Negroes who help Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge in Flags in the Dust; he treats Bayard's broken body with great gentleness.

Mandy is the only woman who lives at the MacCallum place in Flags in the Dust. She cooks for the white family, although the narrator describes Henry MacCallum as "a better cook now than Mandy" (335). Her size and shape are indicated by the narrator's description of the way her "homely calico expanse" fills the doorway between the house and the kitchen (336).

One of the two "young" white men (the other is Hub) in Flags in the Dust who spend an evening with Young Bayard, along with Reno and two other young black men, drinking, driving and serenading ladies out of and in Jefferson. Mitch sings "Goodnight, Ladies" in a "true, oversweet tenor" voice (143). He is a "freight agent" (140), and may be the same character as Mitch Ewing in "Hair."

In Flags in the Dust "Pappy" is the "older negro" (213) of the two who rescue Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge and carry him home; he is suspicious both of meddling with a white man and of the automobile. The "younger negro" is his son, John Henry (213).

Loosh Peabody married a woman he "courted for fourteen years before he was able to marry her" (400). She lived somewhere "forty miles" away from Jefferson, outside Yoknapatawpha, and the demands of his patients meant that Peabody could not even see her as often as once a year. We can infer she is patient and loyal, but all the narrator of Flags in the Dust says is that her "only child" is Lucius Peabody, Jr. (400).

During the Civil War, General Pope was the general in command of the Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run in September, 1862. The story Jenny tells in Flags in the Dust about her brother Bayard accompanying General J.E.B. Stuart's raiding party to Pope's headquarters in Virginia in April, 1862, forms a mythic part of the Sartoris inheritance. In April 1862, however, Pope was in fact in Mississippi. It was his success there that led Lincoln soon afterwards to bring Pope east and put him in command of the North's Army of Virginia.

"A rotund man with bristling hair and lapping jowls like a Berkshire hog" (102), Res is the cashier at Old Bayard's bank in Flags in the Dust.

This is the named man among the "two negro men" and the boy in the MacCallum kitchen in Flags in the Dust (336). Mandy calls him "Richud" (337). Buddy calls him "Dick" (338). So it seems likely that his full name is Richard, though neither that nor his role in the household or on the family's land is spelled out.

In Flags in the Dust Sibleigh serves in France with the Sartoris twins in the Royal Air Force during World War I. He agrees to serve as flying bait to lure Ploeckner into Bayard's sights. (He also appears in the non-Yoknapatawpha fiction "With Honor and Dispatch.")

In Flags in the Dust Sol is the porter who helps Horace with his luggage when he returns to Jefferson from France.

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was one of the most famous and flamboyant Confederate officers, in command of Lee's cavalry for most of the Civil War. In Flags in the Dust he and "Carolina" Bayard Sartoris, Stuart's friend and aide-de-camp, embody the spirit of chivalry and romantic daring that the narrative identifies with pre-Modern life. Aunt Jenny, who tells the highly-colored story about him and Bayard as mythic heroes, says she danced with Stuart once, before the war, in Baltimore.

Manfred von Richthofen, better known as "The Red Baron," shot down more planes than any other aviator in World War I. Young Bayard tells his grandfather and great-great-aunt that the German pilot who shot down Johnny was a "pupil of Richthofen's" (43).

In Flags in the Dust the woman who owns the boarding house in Jefferson where the two carpetbaggers are staying is named Mrs. Winterbottom. According to Will Falls' story about the event, she stands "gapin' after him with her mouth open" when Colonel Sartoris goes up to their room and shoots them both (243). (The third time Faulkner tells this story, in "Skirmish at Satoris" and again in The Unvanquished, the hotel is owned by Mrs. Holston.)

One of the Confederate officers who rides with J.E.B. Stuart in Flags in the Dust; it is on his horse that the captured Union Major is carried. (He does not seem to be related in any way to the Wyatt sisters who live next door to the Benbows in Jefferson.)

Sally Wyatt's older sister is named Sophia in Flags in the Dust; she runs the household in which the three elderly Wyatt sisters live "in a capable shrewish fashion" (175).

The "fellow recruit" in Flags in the Dust who calls Buddy MacCallum "Virge" during their training at a camp in Arkansas; in response Buddy fights him "without anger" for "seven minutes" (355).

In its brief account of Horace's term as a Rhodes Scholar in England, Flags in the Dust mentions the "fellow-countrymen" with whom he occasionally travels on the "Continent" (177).

This very peripheral character is mentioned in Flags in the Dust in one of Monaghan's anecdotes about his experiences with Bayard Sartoris in World War I as the "A.P.M." whose whistle Comyn took and used to start a melee in an Amiens night club called the Cloche-Clos (387). The Provost Marshals ran the army's military police.

In Flags in the Dust Young Bayard mentions this major during his talk with Rafe MacCallum "about the war"; the memory features a fight in "the Leicester lounge" in which "the Anzac lost two teeth" and Bayard himself "got a black eye" (124). The fight may have been over "two ladies," and may have been between Bayard and the Major, but none of that is made clear. Faulkner may have meant this character to be the same as the Australian captain whose teeth Bayard knocks out in a bar in London (cf.

In Flags in the Dust this is the employee inside the train's baggage car. His race is not specified, and his reply to Horace's concern about the fragility of his glass blowing equipment makes it hard to determine it. Linguistically he sounds 'black': "All right, colonel. . . . we ain't hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us" (157). But his unsubmissive attitude toward the white Horace suggests he is 'white' himself.

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).

In Flags in the Dust the men who own businesses or have offices or work in stores on the Square appear several times, specifically separated out from the larger population of Jefferson. They most frequently are associated with either Old Bayard or Jenny Du Pre.

In Flags in the Dust this carnival employee is mentioned in Narcissa's account of the time Johnny Sartoris flew over Yoknapatawpha in a balloon. John does that when ptomaine poisoning makes the man to ill to fly the balloon himself.

The only native American character mentioned in Flags in the Dust, this "Choctaw woman" gave Will Falls' grandmother the recipe for an ointment "nigh a hundred and thutty years ago" (227). That would be around 1790, at which time the Choctaw was one of the major tribes living in the southeastern U.S, including Mississippi. They inhabit Yoknapatawpha in Faulkner's earliest fictions. However, historically the tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha was the Chickasaw, and in his later fictions Faulkner uses that name instead.