Character Keys

In the chapter he narrates in The Mansion, Montgomery Ward refers to this girl when, in a passage summing up the scoundrels in his family, he talks about "Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other" (93). In The Town Wesley is caught having sex with a fourteen-year-old, so it is certainly possible that Monty is referring to a real event and victim, but it seems more probable that, as in his use of the word "infant," Monty is inventing or exaggerating here.

In The Mansion as Gavin and Ratliff walk through Allanovna's store on their way to her office, they see "two ladies in black dresses and a man dressed like a congressman or at least a preacher"; that this well-dressed group are clerks becomes clear when they recognize Gavin as a former customer (186).

The narrator of Flags in the Dust notes that the Benbow house in Jefferson, and its large lawn and drive, were designed by "an English architect of the '40s" (e.g. the 1840s, 163). In other texts, the Old Frenchman place in the county was designed by an English architect at about the same time, but there's no indication that it was the same man.

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.

The "servant" in Flags in the Dust who "methodically" packs up Horace Benbow's possessions as he is getting ready to leave Oxford to return to America (178).

In "Two Soldiers," when the Grier boy arrives at the place in Memphis where "folks join the Army" (9) - i.e. the Memphis recruiting station - he sees "two fellers standing . . . and some more folks there, I reckon . . . It seems to me I remember some more folks there" (94). The iteration seems Faulkner's way of suggesting how many young men are responding to their country's need in a time of war.

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 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).

The "boy slave who turned the wheel" is the steersman on Studenmare's steamboat (366). His age is not given, but the narrator of "A Courtship" notes that he is "not much more than half as big as Captain Studenmare" (366).

In a striking parenthetical passage in both "Skirmish at Sartoris" and The Unvanquished, Bayard describes how Mrs. Compson's husband "would gather up eight or ten little niggers" from among the slaves on his plantation and shoot sweet potatoes off their heads with a rifle (62, 193). It is not clear if Bayard saw this with his own eyes, but he does add that "they would stand mighty still" (62, 193). It's also not clear which Mr. Compson this could be.

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).

In New Orleans, according to Mr. Compson's account in Absalom!, Bon takes Henry to a place where mixed-race slave women are sold as mistresses: "a row of faces like a bazaar of flowers, the supreme apotheosis of chattelry, of human flesh bred of the two races" to be sold as sexual objects (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)

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).

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.

Owned by Mohataha, the matriarch of the Chickasaws in Requiem for a Nun, this "Negro slave girl" holds "a French parasol" over her master when Mohataha comes to town in a wagon (169).

In The Reivers, Ned McCaslin's grandmother is identified only as "a Negro slave" who belonged to Lucius McCaslin (31). According to McCaslin family lore, and Ned himself, she was impregnated by the white man who owned her, Old Carothers McCaslin.

In Absalom! this "negro groom" accompanies Henry Sutpen to college as his personal servant (77). Among his duties is carrying letters back and forth between Oxford and Sutpen's Hundred, and it is presumably he who at the beginning of the Civil War "steals into the quarters by night" to give "Judith's maid" Henry's final letter to Judith (273).

In Requiem for a Nun Sutpen's "Negro headman and hunter" assists him in tracking down and capturing the runaway architect (32).

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).

This enslaved man - one of the two men for whom Sam "Had-Two-Fathers" is named - was already married to the woman whom Crawfish-ford covets when they arrived at the Indian plantation from New Orleans (345). He tries in several different ways to prevent Crawfish-ford from claiming his wife, and finally gets Doom to help him in that quest. When nine months later his wife gives birth to his child, he proudly asks "What do you think about this for color?" (359).

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.

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished Matt Bowden - pretending to be a Tennessee planter chasing Grumby's gang himself - tells Bayard, Ringo and Uncle Buck that Grumby's gang "killed one of my niggers" (104), by which he means one of his enslaved men. It's unlikely that any part of his story is true.

In the "Was" chapter of Go Down, Moses, this unnamed member of the group of slaves who are part of the hunt for Tomey’s Turl is the one who returns to the big house to fetch a fyce, whiskey, and a "piece of red ribbon that had been on Miss Sophonsiba's neck" that she sends to Buck (17).

Absalom!'s narrative speculates - hyperbolically - about the existence of a "special" slave in the lawyer's office, whose sole job is to carry faked reports about Sutpen's whereabouts to Bon's mother (244).

Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.

There are two references in "Appendix Compson" to the slaves who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War. The term "slaves" appears only in reference to the "shiftless slaves" owned by the descendants of the Chickasaw tribe who remain in the region after the Indian Removal (329). But the Compson family, like the other "masters of plantations" in Yoknapatawpha, owned a number of slaves as well (328).

The unnamed man whom "Red Leaves" calls "Issetibbeha's body servant" - though there is never any ambiguity about the fact that he is owned as a slave by the Choctaw chief - is the short story's central character, Faulkner's earliest non-white protagonist. According to tribal custom, after Issetibbeha's death he must be killed and buried too; the story's main action focuses on his thoughts and actions as he attempts to escape this fate. Although he is not given a name, the story does give him a biography.

The men whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to as "the steamboat slaves" (367, 378) are the deckhands and firemen who do the physical work on board Captain Studenmare's riverboat.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun "one of the Holston slaves - the cook's husband, the waiter-groom-hostler" - delivers Holston's demand for the lost lock after the bandits and the imprisoned militia have taken apart the jail and escaped (208, 14).

This good Samaritan in The Hamlet brings Eula home after the salesman who has been courting her took her to a dance in "a schoolhouse about eight miles away" - "and vanished" (147).

During his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7 of Intruder in the Dust, Gavin Stevens refers with clear contempt to what he calls "the coastal spew of Europe" that lives in the urban, industrial North, an undefined group that he juxtaposes to "the New Englander" who lives "back inland" away from the cities on the coast (150). The distinction is a hierarchical and even moral one: the traditional (i.e.

These "heiresses to European thrones" appear only inside a quasi-Homeric or mock-heroic simile when the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares Willy Ingrum, who moves to Jefferson from Beat Four, marries "a town girl," and becomes the "town marshal" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of specific members of European royalty.

Two of the major characters in "Knight's Gambit" spend time in Europe before or after the First World War. During the decade Mrs. Harriss and her two children spend in pre-War Europe, the contents of her letters home from Europe relate tales "of the families of the porters and waiters who had been kind or at least gentle with her and the children, and of the postmen who delivered the mail from home" (167).

In "Dry September" one of the men in the barber shop who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes is a veteran. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).

In Requiem for a Nun these "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194). Calling out-of-state students "exchange students" is an odd formulation, suggesting that 'the North' they come from is essentially a different country - as of course it would have been to the Confederates who originally carried those flags during the Civil War.

Although Flags in the Dust does not describe this "youth" in any detail, it does specify the "practical joke" for which he was expelled "from the state university": "he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls' dormitory" (186).

In "Beyond" Judge Allison mentions the "extra groom" who went with the Allison family when they rode to church in order to tend his son's pony while they were in services (790). "Groom" here means a person employed to take care of horses.

In As I Lay Dying, Addie tells Anse Bundren before they marry that "I have people. In Jefferson" - adding when he worries about what such "town folks" will think of him, that "they're in the cemetery" (171). Supposedly re-uniting Addie with her deceased family is the reason for the Bundrens' trek to that same cemetery, but the novel never mentions them again - not even when the Bundrens do finally get to the cemetery.

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, and raise him there after her death.

In The Hamlet this man owns the farm where Ike Snopes finds food for his cow. He is a "man past middleage" with a "grim and puritanical affinity for abstinence and endurance" (211); angry at the loss of his feed and a feed basket, he angrily pursues Ike through the woods.

In Intruder in the Dust when Chick sees a truck parked outside his house, he assumes it belongs to someone like "a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor" (72). Although he is wrong, Chick even imagines what this hypothetical person looks like: "a man with a shaved sun-burned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants" (73).

These are the local Yoknapatawpha men in "Hand upon the Waters" who own the "topless and battered cars, the saddled horses and mules and the wagons, the riders and drivers of which" Gavin Stevens knows by name (72). The men show up to Lonnie Grinnup's inquest in their "clean Saturday overalls and shirts and the bared heads and the sunburned necks striped with the white razor lines of Saturday neck shaves" (72). Among these men are the "folks" who go out to view Grinnup's camp and trotline later and see Joe hanging about (77).

In Go Down, Moses a growing number of local men join the hunters at Major de Spain’s camp to see Lion hunt down Old Ben. The men have a stake in the hunt: they “had fed Old Ben corn and shoats and even calves for ten years” (224). They are described as “in their own hats and hunting coats and overalls which any town negro would have thrown away or burned and only the rubber boots strong and sound, and the worn and blueless guns and some even without guns” (224).

These Yoknapatawpha farmers are part of "Knight's Gambit" in two ways. As a larger group, they become part of the audience that watches as Mr. Harriss transforms a traditional county plantation into a kind of Hollywood set. Some of them cross "the whole county" to watch the landscapers and builders at work (161), and "farmers" are specifically included in the groups of spectators who attend the sporting events that are staged there (163).

The man who was Addie Bundren's father is mentioned in only two paragraphs in As I Lay Dying. We learn from several sources that Addie's "people" lived in Jefferson (171), though we are not given any idea where or what their family name was. We are also told that by the time she meets Anse Bundren, all Addie's family are now buried "in the cemetery" in town (171). Her father is the one member of this family who is individuated, though he exists in the novel only as a voice that she remembers saying "that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead" a long time (175).

As Joseph Blotner points out, in a typescript for "The Old People" the father of the story's narrator is referred to as "Mr Compson" (presumably the Mr. Compson who is Benjy, Caddy, Quentin and Jason's father), but the character is given no name at all in this magazine version of the story. All we can say with certainty about him is that he belongs to Yoknapatawpha's upper-class, owns a farm four miles from Jefferson and has an office in town. He goes hunting every November with Major de Spain, Walter Ewell, Boon Hogganbeck and Uncle Ike McCaslin.

In The Hamlet the father of one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who courted Eula before her marriage eventually sells his son's neglected buggy to a "negro farm-hand" (165).

The father of the unnamed Negro who marries Fonsiba is only mentioned in passing in Go Down, Moses, but occupies a significant place in the Yoknapatawpha fiction as an African American who served in the Union army. There were in historical fact almost 180,000 'Colored troops' during the Civil War, serving in both non-combat and combat roles, but until recently these men were largely invisible in American representations of that war. This man is the only black "Yankee" soldier in Faulkner's work (261).