Character Keys

In The Reivers Delphine is the cook in Grandfather Priest's house and the fourth and current wife of Ned McCaslin (31).

In The Reivers "Grandfather's mother" is mentioned twice: when Lucius Priest assumes that she taught her son to "make his manners" to a lady in the same way that the males in the family always do (200); and when Lucius notes that his Grandfather, "an only child," stayed with his mother in Carolina while his father was away fighting during the Civil War (285). She died in 1864.

Gowan Stevens' mother never appears in person, but three Yoknapatawpha fictions mention her. If we re-arrange their order of publication as the sequence of events in her biography, her youngest mention occurs in The Town, where she accompanies her husband for the duration of his State Department assignment to "some far place" - which explains why she sends her son Gowan from Washington to Jefferson (3).

We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.

Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.

Although he is mentioned in three short stories and actually appears in three novels, the father of Charles Mallison, Jr., remains an elusive character. He is dead in the first story that mentions him ("An Error in Chemistry") and almost irrelevant even in the texts where he appears: Intruder in the Dust, The Town and The Mansion. His wife, Maggie Stevens by birth and Gavin's twin sister, sometimes calls him Charley, and according to The Town he owns the livery stable in Jefferson (at a time when cars are displacing horses).

The mother of Gavin and Maggie - Mrs. Lemuel Stevens, nee Maggie Dandridge - doesn't appear in person in the fictions, but various items associated with her do. In Intruder in the Dust the hat Eunice Habersham wears reminds her grandson Chick Mallison of her; it's a "round faintly dusty-looked black hat set squarely on the top of her head" (73); on both women, this looks "exactly right" (127). In "Knight's Gambit" Chick thinks of the books in his family's house as "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149).

There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).

Although through most of the 1930s and 1940s Gavin Stevens looks like a confirmed bachelor, in four late fictions Faulkner decided to add love and marriage to his biography. The woman he marries was born Melisandre Backus, the descendant of the Melisandre who married a Backus in the middle of the Civil War ("My Grandmother Millard") and more immediately the only child of a Yoknapatawpha plantation owner. By the time she marries Gavin, she is the widow of a New Orleans gangster and the mother of two children.

Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43).

In The Hamlet I.O. Snopes calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that she is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a twice-married man, i.e. a bigamist.

As a child, a hulking and "bear-shaped" figure, Saint Elmo eats all of the candy in Varner's case (350). A son of I.O. Snopes from his first marriage, he appears only in The Hamlet. (The names of the various Snopeses come from a variety of sources; Saint Elmo's name comes from the title of an 1866 novel by Georgia author Augusta Jane Evans.)

On the Snopes family tree, Clarence - according to The Mansion, it's "pronounced 'Cla'nce'" (325) - is the son of I.O. and the half-brother of Montgomery Ward Snopes. He is one of the four Snopes named in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, but appears only as the boy whose "hulking but catlike presence" makes Bryon Snopes nervous (235). It is in Sanctuary that his character as one of the most venal Snopeses emerges.

Vardaman (and his twin brother Bilbo) are minor figures in The Town and The Hamlet, one of the three (or four, in the second novel) sons of I.O. Snopes and his second wife. Also like Bilbo, he is named for one of the segregationist politicians in modern Mississippi politics, in his case for James K. Vardaman, a very outspoken white supremacist who served as both a Governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.

This "Jicarilla squaw" from "Old Mexico" is the mother of "Byron Snopes's children" (379), the four sinister kids who appear at the end of The Town and then, as soon as Yoknapatawpha realizes how dangerous they are, are sent back into the west. She is mentioned, barely, in The Mansion, but nothing more can be said about her.

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

When Byron Snopes's four children step off the train in Jefferson, Chick describes the youngest as "a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man's shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent" (378). He never indicates the sex of this child, perhaps because he cannot determine it himself - or perhaps to emphasize the strangeness of the four as a group. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218).

Wallstreet Panic Snopes - given his absurd name absurdly, in the hopes that it might mean he'll get rich, but more often called "Wall" in the fictions - is a very young "little periwinkle-eyed boy" when he first appears in The Hamlet (304). He appears in all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy, and his eyes are still "an incredible tender youthful periwinkle blue" at the end of The Mansion (461).

Ad - Admiral Dewey Snopes - is one of Eck Snopes' children. He was named after a hero of the Spanish-American War.

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving, neither the chief of the tribe (The Man) nor his son are named. In the patriarchal society Faulkner imagines, this son is heir to the title The Man - and as the son of The Man's sister, his cousin Doom is out of the line of succession. In "Red Leaves" both The Man and his son die mysteriously after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans. In "A Justice" Doom's responsibility for their deaths is made explicit.

Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).

This character is one of the more elusive in Faulkner's fiction. The Harpers Magazine version of "The Old People" creates an ambiguity when it says that "almost a hundred years ago" Ikkemotubbe sold "his own son" to a white planter, the great-grandfather of the narrator on whose farm Sam lived for most of his life (203). Since Sam is "seventy" years old (202), he could not be this man, and would have to be this man's son.

Based on the phrase "one of the sisters" in Absalom!, we can say that Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters (185). This entry is not the sister who gets pregnant, twice, during the family's trip from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia.

In both "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun the "half orphan" son of Doctor Habersham is eight years old when he first arrives at the Mississippi settlement with his widowed father (202, 6). As a grown man, he becomes the government's local Indian agent and marries a Chickasaw woman who is the granddaughter of either Issetibbeha (202; 7) or (in Requiem's second mention of the event, of Mohataha, 170).

According to Mr. Compson in Absalom! Clytemnestra's mother is one of the two women among the twenty slaves that Sutpen brought with him to Yoknapatawpha. The novel does not describe her, nor try to represent the relationship between her and Sutpen, the white man who claims to own her.

In The Sound and the Fury Maury Bascomb is the brother of Caroline Bascomb Compson. For much of the Compson children's early life he lives in their home and regularly partakes of their father's whiskey; by 1928 he has moved away, but continues regularly to ask his sister for money. Benjy was originally named "Maury" in his honor. He also has an affair with the Compsons' next door neighbor, Mrs. Patterson. When the affair is revealed, Mr. Patterson beats Uncle Maury - or as Benjy puts it, "His eye was sick, and his mouth" (43).

The first husband of the woman whom Gavin Stevens eventually marries is a bootlegger from New Orleans named only Mr. Harriss. Faulkner describes his offstage death memorably in three different texts: in "Knight's Gambit" he dies at his desk, "maybe," "because you can be shot just as discreetly across a desk in an office as anywhere else" (167–68); in The Town, he is brought back to Yoknapatawpha from New Orleans in "a bullet-proof hearse" (187); in The Mansion, he dies in a barber's chair, of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e.

Like her mother, the 20-year-old daughter of "Mrs. Harriss" never gets a first name in "Knight's Gambit," the only text in which she has a significant presence. In other respects too she takes after her mother: "looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain" (190–91).

Like Nat Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses, Roth's mistress - James Beauchamp’s unnamed granddaughter in the revised version of "Delta Autumn" Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses - has an aunt in Vicksburg with whom she stays. This unnamed aunt is a widow who takes in washing to support her family. For someone like Ike McCaslin, raised in the culture of the Jim Crow South, "taking in washing" is enough to identify this woman, and her very light-skinned niece, as black.

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.

The slave Thucydides/Thucydus only appears in the novel Go Down, Moses by way of the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but the story outlined there is striking. He is the son of Roskus and Fibby and the husband who marries Eunice in the same year she is made pregnant by Old Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owns all four of these slaves. He was born in North Carolina. In his will Old Carothers bequeaths him land, but like Ike McCaslin, Thucydides renounces this inheritance. Instead, according to the ledgers, he chooses "to stay [on the plantation] and work it out" - i.e.

The mother of Eck is mentioned in The Hamlet because when Eck's first wife dies, Eck leaves their son, Wallstreet Panic, with his mother to raise, but she plays that role outside the narrative. She is also mentioned in the other two volumes in the Snopes trilogy, again in terms of something that happens outside the narrative, if it happens at all. Because Eck is such a good and generous person, in The Town Gavin Stevens declares that he 'must' be illegitimate, that his mother was committing adultery with someone not named Snopes when he was conceived.

In The Mansion Mink Snopes describes "the lady that raised me" as "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).

Another Snopes who appears for the first time in the last novel of the Snopes trilogy, Watkins Products Snopes is the carpenter and kinsman whom Flem hires to renovate the house that was formerly owned by Manfred de Spain; it is Wat's work, along with Flem's ambitions, that create 'the mansion' of the novel's title. He is named for a real company that has sold health products since 1868. His exact relationship to Flem or any of the other Snopeses is never specified.

After referring to the "incoming Snopeses" as a group, the narrator of Flags in the Dust singles out one to individualize: "there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut parcher" (167). A "parcher" is a pushcart for roasting and selling peanuts on the street. (This may be the fictions' first mention of Eck Snopes. In The Town; Eck works as a watchman who wears a neck brace and is liked by "all the boys" in Jefferson because "he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts" that he would share with them by the "handful" (116).

The Hamlet summarily describes Lump Snopes' grandmother as a "whining and sluttish" woman who keeps having children (218).

Described in The Hamlet as a "thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat," Lump's mother grew up in a large family plagued by "a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies" (218). Despite her desire to better herself through education and teaching, she married a "man under indictment" and gave birth to a son that she named after the Arthurian knight Launcelot as an act of "quenchless defiance" against the grim circumstances of her life. She died soon after.

The Hamlet provides virtually no details about Eck's first wife, beyond the possibility that she died either in childbirth or soon afterward (295). She and Eck had only one son, Wallstreet Panic, although the boy did not receive any actual name for some years.

According to another character in The Hamlet, "Eustace's ma" - that is, the mother of Eustace Grimm - "was Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399).

When Eustace Grimm first appears in the canon, in As I Lay Dying, he is simply someone who "works at Snopes’ place" (192); in that role he brings Anse the team of mules he traded for with Mr. Snopes. He plays a more complex role in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, as the "youngish man" in overalls with a snuff stick in his mouth" from "the adjoining county" who seems to be competing with Suratt and Tull to buy the Old Frenchman place (147).

In the short story "By the People," Clarence Snopes' grandmother is identified as Billy Varner's "distant cousin by marriage," which helps explain Varner's interest in Clarence's career (130). (When Faulkner retells the story of Clarence as Varner's protege in The Mansion, his grandmother is not mentioned.)

This is one of the two Snopeses in The Town whose place in the family is impossible to determine. He is mentioned in connection with Ab Snopes' moving into Frenchman's Bend: "another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm" that Ab had been working (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible.

Chick Mallison says in The Town that Dink "had married one of Mr Snopes's sisters or nieces or something out at Frenchman's Bend and when Mr Snopes sent I.O. Snopes back to the country the Quistenberrys came into buy or rent or anyway run the Snopes Hotel"; he adds that "Dink was old enough to be Mr Snopes's brother-in-law or whatever it was but he was the kind of man it just didn't occur to you to say Mister to" (378). The "Mr Snopes" in these phrases is of course Flem, but that doesn't help clarify how Flem and Quistenberry are related.

The Mansion calls this Snopes "the last" in the sequence of Snopeses who move from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson, and also "the old one" (136). He is extremely choleric: "fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red" as soon as he felt challenged (136). He doesn't actually move into town, but reaches a point "in sight of the town clock" and then refuses to go further (136), settling into a place where he can wage war against the boys who try to raid his "water-melon patch" (137). Some people think he is "Mr Flem's father" (i.e.

When Eustace Grimm first appears in The Hamlet, he and his wife have just had a "baby born two months ago" (387). No other details, not even the baby's gender, are revealed, but since Eustace's mother is "Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399), this child deserves a place on the Snopes family tree.

Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the U.S. who led the nation during the Civil War, is mentioned in 10 Yoknapatawpha fictions, almost as many as Robert E. Lee - and more than twice as many as Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. He never appears in person, and is typically represented from the perspective of one or another former Confederate. In "Wash," Colonel Thomas Sutpen longs to "shoot [Lincoln and General Sherman] down, like the dogs they are" (540).