Character Keys

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 Parchman prisoners are not described in any detail in The Mansion, but "trustee" 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.

"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 Meadowfill buys the wheelchair of a "paralytic old lady" who recently died (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).

As part of his memory of the train he watched "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" in The Mansion, Mink Snopes recalls that inside each car he could see the "uppity impudent" porters, and the black men who "waited" on the white people eating in the dining car (445).

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). 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).

"Jehovah's Shareholders" is the name religious sect in Parchman's Penitentiary (111). According to the narrator of The Mansion, 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).

In The Mansion Mink imagines that someone else will kill Flem before he can.

Mink has two actual daughters; this "daughter" who lives in "the Delta" is one he invents in The Mansion to keep the Negro cotton farmer from identifying him (439).

In keeping with entrenched traditions, the Holston House in The Mansion still has "Negro man waiters," some of whom are the sons of previous generations of waiters (421), and in the ladies dressing room there is "a maid" (422).

In The Mansion this Harvard classmate of Gavin Stevens helps him get a petition to the Governor for Mink's release, and also helps Stevens track Mink down later. (A former Harvard classmate of Gavin, also unnamed, appears in Light in August, but there's no way to know if Faulkner is thinking of the same man here.)

In a passage in The Mansion that provides a rare glimpse into Stevens' life after he marries the wealthy Melisandre Backus Harriss, the narrator describes his discomfort whenever "guests, even the same guest or guests again," came to dinner (399).

The only thing said about Varner's grandson in The Mansion is that he had a love interest whom the eighty-year old Varner ended up marrying himself.

The Mansion goes back to the story of the Sartoris twins in World War I and adds a detail to John Sartoris' resume: fighting with the "Royal Flying Corps" in World War I (204), John shot down "three huns" (212) in combat.

This woman in The Mansion used to work in a "Catalpa Street house" (305), an address that means she was a prostitute in one of the many brothels in Memphis. According to Albert, "she looks a little like a whore yet," but after her husband died in World War II, she became a member of Goodyhay's eccentric congregation (305).

In The Mansion the trustee in Parchman is a "lifer" - someone sentenced to life imprisonment - for killing "his wife with a ball peen hammer" (423). Her father has sworn to kill the man, but we don't know anything more about her.

In The Mansion as Gavin and Ratliff walk through Allanova'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).

In The Mansion the Sheriff deputizes "two boys at Varner's store" to keep a look out for Mink Snopes (434). "Boys" of course is a colloquial southern term for lower class men - as in 'good ole boys' - and these "boys" must be full-grown men, since they claim to "remember" Mink from before he went to prison. (In the same vocabulary, "boy" is also a derogatory term for adult black men, but it's not likely that blacks would be "at Varner's store" - and even less likely that they would be given an unofficial job in law enforcement.)

This married couple gives Goodyhay and Mink a ride to the chapel in The Mansion; the car they drive is "hard-used and a little battered" (304).

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).