Character Keys

According to The Mansion, this group of "men and boys" come repeatedly each day to the shed by the depot to see the trains pass (38).

The man who sells tickets to the movie at Jefferson's Airdome in The Mansion appears only as "a voice" that speaks to Mink "from the ticket window" (37).

This figure in The Mansion is a hypothetical character: the stereotypical prosecuting attorney whom a convicted criminal is going to get even with whenever he's released from prison.

There are a "considerable" number of "fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls" in The Mansion who admire Skeets Magowan as he makes sodas at the drugstore (208).

In The Mansion Linda and Kohl fight alongside the "Loyalists" in the Spanish Civil War. The Loyalists included many volunteers from other countries as well as Spanish men and women, fighting for the Republic against Francisco Franco and his fascist supporters.

At the wedding reception in Kohl's studio apartment in The Mansion, Ratliff notes the "two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne," but adds that "three or four" of the guests were "helping too" (191).

In The Mansion the Parchman warden shows Mink a telegram from the Chief of Police in San Diego giving information about Stillwell's death.

In The Mansion when Linda Snopes Kohl tells the Mallisons "about the people" in the Spanish Civil War, she includes "a Russian poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed" (241). It's not clear whom Faulkner has in mind, if he has a real poet in mind at all, but since the other two writers Linda mentions - Hemingway and Malraux - are historical figures who were in Spain, he may mean Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who was killed fighting for the Republicans in that war.

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.)

These 121 Mississippi Representatives are the political colleagues of Clarence Snopes in The Mansion. With him included there are 122 total members of the House, which is a historically accurate number. Clarence addresses these men soon after assuming office.

The reference to this character|these characters in The Mansion is a good example of how hard it is to create data entries for many of the inhabitants of Faulkner's imaginative world. As part of the novel's description of Jake Wattman's moonshine operation, the narrator refers to the "recurrent new reform-administration sheriff" in Yoknapatawpha who hopes to raid it (244). "Sheriff" is singular. "Recurrent," however, suggests more than one sheriff.

According to The Mansion's account of how a Russian fighting for the British as a German mercenary during the Revolutionary War became the founder of the Ratliff family in Yoknapatawpha, the name first belonged to a farm family in Virginia. Some time after Nelly Ratcliffe begins secretly feeding Vladimir Kyrilytch, she "brings him out where her folks could see him" (184). Some time after that, her "ma or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor," noticed that she was pregnant, "and so" Nelly and this first V.K. were married, using her last name (184).

"Turnkey" is a colloquial term for jailor; this "turnkey" is the official at Parchman in The Mansion who opens the gate for Mink's release (423).

The ministers in Jefferson, all of whom are Protestants, resent Eula for her open infidelity. Later in The Mansion, however, the town's "white ministers" cannot find a reason to "go on record against" Linda Snopes Kohl's work as a Sunday school teacher at "one of the Negro churches" (254).

Will Varner's picnic is attended by "every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules" (348). The Mansion takes for granted the fact that "every voter" is white.

These two men run the pawn shop that sells Mink a gun in The Mansion. They are described as being "blue-jowled as pirates" (320).

These "dozen trusties" in the Parchman penitentiary are not described in any detail in The Mansion (74), but "trusty" is the generic term for prison inmates who can be trusted to help the authorities administer the institution. They are typically given (minor) privileges and allowed (limited) freedoms that other inmates aren't. Montgomery Ward Snopes assumes Flem could bribe one of them to kill Mink for "ten grand" - ten thousand dollars (74).

"They were picking the cotton now" (100) - after Mink has been released from the penitentiary, this is how in The Mansion he thinks about the inmates who remain in Parchman's, most of whom work as field hands on the farm around the prison.

The Mansion refers to "Yoknapatawpha County's three original settlers" (421) but only gives one of them a name: Alexander Holston (he has his own Character entry). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions this group always includes Samuel Habersham, sometimes along with his (unnamed) son; in "Hand Upon the Waters," the group includes an ancestor of Gavin Stevens as one of the three.

While some "old people" are included in the group in The Mansion that goes to the movie in Jefferson ("couples, young men and girls and old people," 36), this entry represents the "old people" that the narrative specifically identifies, who "didn't go to the picture show" but instead sit in their rocking chairs (38).

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).

In The Mansion this boy "delivers the Memphis and Jackson papers" in Jefferson (371). The town speculates that Meadowfill pays him to "bait his orchard at night," in order to attract Res Snopes' hog (371).

These are the family members in The Mansion who sell Meadowfill the wheelchair that belonged to the dead woman who was their relative and his neighbor.

The character named Dad in The Mansion speculates that "the rest of the folks in the neighborhood" of Goodyhay's unconventional church won't "put up with no such as this" (300). He assumes they will object to Goodyhay's congregation of ex-soldiers and their families as "a passel of free-loading government-subsidised ex-drafted sons of bitches" who want to do "something" politically radical about the American status quo (300).

In The Mansion this "paralytic old lady" lived near Meadowfill's; she is mentioned in the story because after her death, he buys her "wheel chair" from her family (362).

This is the black man who works for Flem Snopes in The Mansion. In his narrative Ratliff calls him both the "yard boy" (172) and "the yard man" (173), "that Negro yard man" (182); given Ratliff's dialect and the white Southern use of "boy" to keep black men in the place that segregation defines for them, it's safe to say this "boy" is in fact a "man." In addition to his work around and outside Flem's mansion, he drives Flem's car "now and then" (172), though Ratliff notes that "he never had no white coat and showfer's [i.e. chauffeur's] cap" (174).

In The Mansion this unnamed Negro reports to Ratliff about seeing Mink Snopes making his way back to town.

After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). The black teachers in the school (along with their students) are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). Linda's plan would "send" these same black teachers "North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are" - meanwhile replacing them in the school in Jefferson with white teachers (250).

After Linda surrenders her attempt to improve Jefferson's black schools in The Mansion, she meets with "a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches" (254).

While he's in Memphis in The Mansion, Mink goes into a "dingy store" where he sees a "Negro man" who seems to be "running it" and "maybe he even owned it": after all his time in prison Mink wonders if "the new laws" mean a black man "could even own a store" (319).

In The Mansion this man was "bred up on an Arkansas plantation" before becoming a American soldier during World War II (306). He is "new" to the Army when his commander leaves him in a foxhole near the Japanese enemy somewhere in Malaya; before he can be relieved or reinforced, he is killed and beheaded (306).

Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not.

The principal of Jefferson's Negro school in The Mansion is a "college-bred man" and, according to Gavin Stevens, a person "of intelligence and devotion too" (247). In his role as narrator of Chapter 9, Charles Mallison seconds Gavin's words, describing the principal as an "intelligent dedicated man with [a] composed and tragic face" (248). Along with the school's "senior woman teacher," he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247).

The cotton farmer with whom Mink briefly stays in The Mansion has five children between the ages of "five or six and twelve" (438). All five work with their parents picking cotton. Only one is individuated by the narrative: the "oldest girl" (440), who is the "twelve-year-old" and who helps her mother prepare supper (441).

In The Mansion this cotton farmer allows Mink to work and stay the night at his place. As a Negro he expresses himself carefully when talking with the white Mink, but he clearly has doubts about the story Mink has told him about himself.

In The Mansion Wattleg is a moonshiner who sells his whisky out of a "little unpainted store" near Wylie's Crossing that he can take apart and move to avoid the law (244).

In The Mansion the "Mayor" of Memphis is an acquaintance of Gavin Stevens's Harvard friend, who promises to seek his help in the attempt to locate Mink Snopes (426).

In The Mansion, when the U.S. enters the First World War Mack Lendon organizes a company of soldiers "to be known as the Sartoris Rifles in honor of the original Colonel Sartoris" (204). The only two members of the unit who are named are Lendon himself and Tug Nightingale. The company ships out "to Texas for training" (207).

In The Mansion, "Jehovah's Shareholders" is the name of a religious sect inside Parchman's Penitentiary (111). According to the novel's narrator, it was "headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness" (111).

According to the highly fictionalized if not entirely false account Strutterbuck provides about his experience in World War I in The Mansion, his hopes of getting the job driving General Pershing were thwarted by "a Sergeant Somebody, I forget his name" (84).

In his speculations in The Mansion about the source of the anonymous letter accusing Linda of being a Communist, Gavin imagines and then dismisses this "mail clerk" at Parchman as a possible source of information, assuming anyone in that position would probably not be very competent at keeping track of the mail (269).

The "landlord" Mink thinks about in The Mansion while serving his prison sentence in Parchman is a composite figure, made up of the various property owners who over the years have hired and fired him and his family as tenant farmers (102).

The foreman of the "Grand Jury" that found Mink guilty in The Mansion is in later life "a hale (hence still quick) eighty-five"; he runs "a small electric-driven corn-mill" but also spends a lot of time "hunting and fishing with Uncle Ike McCaslin" (407). (Faulkner may have meant "jury," because Grand Juries of course prepare indictments, but don't deliver verdicts.)

These are "the cops" in The Mansion who put out the burning cross in front of 'The Mansion,' i.e. the house where Linda Snopes Kohl lives with her father (252). The narrative says they were "outraged and seething of course, but helpless" - what they are outraged at, however, seems to be the fact that the house belongs to "THE banker" (252). (Faulkner usually identifies the police in Yoknapatawpha as sheriffs, deputies and marshals, but the term 'police' becomes more common in his later fictions; this use of the term 'cops' is even rarer.)

In The Mansion these Japanese troops attack the retreating group of Americans as well as "Aussies, British, French from Indo-China" somewhere in "Malaya" at the start of the Second World War (305). They are never seen, but readers hear them "chirping" in the dark just beyond a line of American foxholes. Their "English" is the stereotypical dialect that once was spoken by Asians in (white) American popular culture: "Maline" (i.e. Marine), "Tonigh youdigh" (306).

According to Charles in The Mansion, Ratliff expects that "some woman" will come along one day and marry Gavin Stevens, after deciding that he is "dependable enough at last for steady work in place of merely an occasional chore" (215).

In The Mansion, as part of his cover story about spending a year in the "Govment Vetruns Hospital" in Memphis, Mink claims that a doctor there told him walking was good for him, and that's why he is "on the road instead of the train" (439).

According to Gavin's musings in The Mansion, Jason's behavior might make one "almost believe" that he had spies in both "the Japanese Diet" and "the U.S. Cabinet too," as he seems to have advance knowledge of the coming war and the air training field that would be built in Jefferson (356). ("Diet" in this context is the name of the legislative branch of the Japanese government.)

After his experience with crime and punishment, the first time Mink buys a "soft drink" in The Mansion he imagines a sheriff will "come for him" if he takes the change from his purchase (287).