Character Keys

While Sanctuary describes the jailer's wife as "a lank, slattern woman," her insistence on giving Ruby a bed after the Baptists got her thrown out of the hotel, despite her husband's reluctance to do so - "I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child," she says; "I don't keer whut Ed says" - is welcomed by Horace (181).

In Sanctuary Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment after that.

Despite his name, in Sanctuary "Uncle Bud" is a "small bullet-headed boy of five or six" (250), "with freckles like splotches of huge summer rain on a sidewalk" (251). He is related somehow to Miss Myrtle, though he is only staying with her temporarily, and will soon "go back home" (252) to "a Arkansaw farm" (251) - perhaps the same Arkansas orphanage where the four children whom Reba is supporting live. He is adept at "snitching beer" (253); after he breaks into the icebox and drinks a whole bottle, he brings Chapter 25 to a close by throwing up.

On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford in Sanctuary are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). One is unnamed, but he calls the other one "Shack," presumably a nickname derived from the confectionery near the college campus (169). "Shack" whistles a "broken dance rhythm" that the narrator calls "meaningless, vertiginous" (169-70).

"A fattish man with thin, curly hair," whose eyeglasses seem to be worn only "for decorum's sake" (149), Dr. Quinn treats Temple when she first arrives at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary. Initially he refused to make a house call on Sunday, but Reba reminds him that she "can put him in jail three times over" (148).

Miss Lorraine is one of the two women in Sanctuary who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after Red's funeral. (The context suggests they might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) Lorraine is the "thin woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses" (250). The narrator refers to her "flat spinster's breast" (256) and several times compares her appearance to that of "a school-teacher" (251, 258).

During the testimony that Temple Drake of Jackson, Mississippi, gives under oath in Sanctuary, she says her mother is dead (285). In Requiem for a Nun, however, Gowan takes Temple's son Bucky to spend a week "with [his] grandparents in New Orleans" (136) -
which resurrects Mrs. Drake and moves her to Louisiana. While in the first novel Temple often thinks of her father, and she refers to him again in the second, her mother is only mentioned in these two incompatible ways.

In Sanctuary the man who fathered Popeye is a professional strike breaker who marries Popeye's mother when she gets pregnant and then, less than three weeks later, runs off - leaving her and the child with a disease that was probably syphilis.

Ruby Lamar is a former Memphis prostitute who appears in Sanctuary as the devoted common-law wife of Lee Goodwin and conscientious mother of their very young child. Earlier she moved to San Francisco and New York to wait for Lee while he was serving overseas, and when he is sentenced to prison for killing fellow U.S. soldier in a fight over another woman, she not only moves to Leavenworth to be near him, but hires a lawyer for him, using her body as payment. When Lee is arrested for killing Tommy, she is prepared to pay Horace the same way.

The narrator of Sanctuary tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135).

"Frank" is mentioned in Sanctuary by Ruby in the bitter conversation she has with Temple. He was a young suitor who wanted to elope with her, but when he insisted on going back to her house to tell her father about their intentions, "father shot him" (58). As Ruby says, Frank "wasn't a coward" (58). To Ruby's brother, who also wants to kill him, Frank is "the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy" (58) - a detail that suggests Frank might be more prosperous than her family.

In Sanctuary one of Temple Drake's brothers is a "newspaper man" (54). But when he finally appears in the narrative, at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial, he is indistinguishable from the other three: one of the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

One of the two brothers of Temple Drake in Sanctuary who "are lawyers" (54), and one of the four who appear at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

The youngest of Temple's four brothers in Sanctuary, Hubert is the only one given a name. He is actually given two: Hubert and Buddy. He told Temple "that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he'd beat the hell out of me" (55). He is a student at Yale, but is there with his brothers at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as one of the the "four younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

The "sitting and lounging men" on the town Square appear in "Dry September" twice (175). The first time sums up the way they "do not even follow [Minnie Cooper] with their eyes any more," after she passes a certain age (175). The second time is when Minnie and her friends go to the movie while the lynching is occurring outside town, after the town has heard about the reported assault on her: "even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and follow with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs" (181).

The boys and girls who are Minnie Cooper's "contemporaries" and "schoolmates" begin to ostracize her before they are finished with high school, apparently because her "people," while "comfortable," are "not the best" people (174). They grow up to date and marry each other and have their own families, leaving Minnie on the sidelines of the town's life.

This man may exist, or be a figment of Minnie Cooper's imagination, or even an invention of the customer in the barber shop who refers to him, obliquely, as the "man scare" that Minnie reportedly had "about a year" before "Dry September" begins; the customer describes him as "a man on the kitchen roof" who was looking at Minnie "undress" (171). We have labeled him 'white' because from the larger story it seems clear that if the reported voyeur had been identified as 'black,' the white men of the town would have had to punish someone.

This is one of the barber shop clients in "Dry September" who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes. Unlike the "drummer" and the client who "had been a soldier" (172), he is not individualized in any particular way. Although he worries that the other men are talking too loudly, he goes along with them on the lynching.

Mrs. McLendon appears at the end of "Dry September" as the "pale, strained, and weary-looking" wife of the man who leads the lynching party (182). When he comes home at midnight and finds her reading a magazine, he accuses her of waiting up for him, and strikes her.

Henry Hawkshaw first appears in "Dry September." He is a Jefferson barber, described as "a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face" (169). He serves as the point of view through which the story's racial violence is presented. He tries to defend Will Mayes' character against the white men who want to lynch him, and even drives with them hoping to prevent the lynching, but in the end only 'saves' himself or at least his sensibility. When he re-appears in "Hair," his liberal sensibilities are again put into action, this time romantically.

Minnie Cooper, the central character in "Dry September," is a Jefferson woman, "thirty-eight or thirty-nine" years of age (173); although the story is vague on this point, it is apparently her accusation of assault against Will Mayes the precipitates the lynching. She is described as "still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress" (174). Never married, she lives with her mother and aunt, and has received local derision for her romantic travails and, more recently, her drinking.

In The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin looks around after Shreve pumps water on his face, he sees a "woman cross the door" of a nearby house, "but she didn't look out" (165).

"Drummers," as traveling salesmen were called, appear three times in Sanctuary sitting in chairs or standing or getting into a "bus" along the curb outside the hotel in Jefferson, first when Horace gets a room for Ruby, again the morning after he speaks with Temple, and then again when he waits in the hotel for a train to take him back to Kinston (124).

In one of his memories in The Sound and the Fury Quentin berates Caddy for "letting it be some darn town squirt" who kissed her (134). A "town squirt" is presumably a young man from a lower class than the Compsons - that same implication is there in Quentin's reference to "the town squirts that Father was always teasing her about" (174) - but it's not clear if Quentin is thinking of any one particular boy here, or remembering one particular event.

In The Sound and the Fury, when Jason drops his niece off at school he notes that "the bell had rung, and the last of them" - the other students - are going inside the building (188).

As part of his fiction about loaning his car to a showman in The Sound and the Fury, Jason invents an adulterous "brother-in-law" involved with "some town woman" (258).

Readers of The Sound and the Fury never see the band that plays in the traveling show visiting Jefferson, but several of the novel's black characters talk about it, and in Jason's section both he and Uncle Job hear the music they are making. "That's a good band," Job says (248); "Dem folks sho do play dem horns" (230). Jason refers to the show's performers as "a bunch of Yankees" (230), but there's no clear evidence that they come from the North.

After leaving Parker's in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin notes that "two bootblacks caught me, one on either side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of them, and the other one a nickel" (83). Though the text does not make their race explicit, the "blackbird" image suggests that these two individuals are African American.

In The Sound and the Fury this "man who mutilated himself" by cutting off his genitals with a "broken razor" is known to readers only through Quentin's recollection of a story Versh tells him (116).

In The Sound and the Fury this man works in the town's printing shop. He advises Jason as to where he might find old checks from a defunct bank.

In The Sound and the Fury the unnamed post office clerk whom Quentin asks about Anse's whereabouts is wearing a "frock coat" and "reading a newspaper" (130). He suggests Quentin take the girl "past them houses by the river" (130).

In The Sound and the Fury when Quentin is taken by Anse across the river and the railroad tracks and up "the main street" of the town outside of Cambridge where he has been wandering, the "procession" also includes two men, Julio and his sister, and the boys who had been swimming (141). This motley parade attracts the attention of the local residents. "People" come their doors "to look at us," and "more boys" join the procession (141). All the novel allows us to say for sure about these townspeople is that they are obviously curious.

When Jason remembers his father's funeral in The Sound and the Fury, he mentions the people who "were holding umbrellas" (201) and who filled in the grave, "throwing dirt into it" (202). Presumably some of these people are from the community, and presumably some are paid cemetery workers, but "they" are not described in any detail.

While reflecting on 'Negroes' and how "they" behave in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin remembers hearing or reading about the "brothel full of them in Memphis" who ran naked into the street during "a religious trance" (170).

In The Sound and the Fury this man is the regular preacher at the Negro church in Jefferson. Though he does not give the Easter sermon, he enters the church with Reverend Shegog and is described in sharp contrast to the "undersized" visiting clergyman: he is "huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat. His head is magisterial and profound, his neck rolled above his collar in rich folds" (293).

The procession at the Negro church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury consists of "six small children: four girls with tight pigtails bound with small scraps of cloth like butterflies, and two boys with close napped heads" (292). At the start of the service on Easter Sunday, the children "entered and marched up the aisle, strung together in a harness of white ribbons and flowers" (292). Later they sing with the choir "in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers" (293).

In The Sound and the Fury Jason questions this man he encounters at "the forks" where two roads diverge about which way the Ford carrying Quentin and the man in the red tie went (238).

While chasing his niece across the Yoknapatawpha countryside Jason thinks about the "slaves" that "my people" used to own; in his mind slave-owning is a source of pride, a symbol of the Compsons' high social standing (239).

While Jason waits in his car outside the locked Mottson drug store in The Sound and the Fury, he watches passerbys and reflects on their perspectives about him: "Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life raveled out about him like a wornout sock, and went on" (313).

In The Sound and the Fury these "two negro lads" tell Jason they can drive a car, but are not willing to take him to Jefferson for two dollars (312).

In The Sound and the Fury these two men help break up Julio's attack on Quentin, and then keep an eye on Julio during the walk to the Squire who will decide Quentin's case. They may be the marshal's assistants, or simply two bystanders who are pulled into the story by Julio's attack on and accusation against Quentin.

In The Sound and the Fury these two men carry the rowing "shell" that Gerald Bland uses from the boat house to the water (90).

On the interurban that carries him back to Cambridge in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin self-consciously notices how the other passengers in the car are all "looking at my [black] eye" (170). One passenger is individualized: looking at his reflection in the window of the car, Quentin sees superimposed on his own face the reflection of this woman sitting across the aisle from him, wearing a hat "with a broken feather in it" (169).

The man with whom Caddy's daughter Quentin runs away from home works for the "show" that performs in Jefferson over the Easter weekend. In The Sound and the Fury, he is identified in both Benjy's and Jason's sections by his "red tie" (49, 232). He is only mentioned in the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, as a "pitchman in a travelling streetshow" (330), but this text adds a detail to his biography: when he left with Miss Quentin, he "was already under sentence for bigamy" (342).

In The Sound and the Fury Benjy remembers seeing "a head come out" of the room where "Father was sick" (34). "It wasn't Father," he knows - though he doesn't know his father has just died - but someone Benjy has not seen before. He seems to be taking charge when he tells T.P. to take Benjy "out of the house," which suggests he might be a doctor (34).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin notices this man "filling a pail" with water from the pump where Shreve is helping him wash his face (165).

The jeweler in The Sound and the Fury to whom Quentin shows his broken watch appears only briefly, but is described in a few vivid details. He is "going bald," his hair is "parted in the center," and "the part runs up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in December" (83, 85). He wears a jeweler's loupe that "left a red circle around his eye" (84). He seems familiar with the customs of Harvard students; Quentin's behavior makes him think he has been drinking, perhaps to celebrate the crew meet in New London.

In The Sound and the Fury, after the Patterson boy stops selling kites with him, Jason finds a new partner, presumably another child about his own age (and presumably more lackadaisical than the Patterson boy about who ends up with the money they make).

The unnamed "secretive" little girl (126) who somehow becomes attached to Quentin in The Sound and the Fury is the child of Italian immigrants, though it is possible that she herself - unlike her older brother Julio - was born in the U.S. Quentin describes her complexion as "like a cup of milk dashed with coffee," implying she is not exactly 'white' (125). She apparently can speak English, but when she meets Quentin at the bakery, she does not tell him who she is or where she lives, and she remains mysteriously silent while he travels with her in search of her home.