Character Keys

These are the adult men in "Hair" who attend "Mr. Miller's men's Bible class" at Reverend Schultz's church; they do not seem to play any role in the church's campaign to reform Willy (228).

Willy Christian's sister in "Uncle Willy" was, like him, born in Jefferson, but she "married an oil millionaire" and now lives in Texas (225). She feels enough concern for her brother's morphine addiction to return to Jefferson on one occasion, and for her family's local reputation to pay the woman Willy marries to leave town on a subsequent occasion.

Job Wylie was probably born a slave, owned by the man he still calls "Marse Hoke Christian" (233). He has worked in the Christian family drugstore ever since it opened "in eighteen-fifty-something," and in the present also works as Willy Christian's cook and housekeeper (226). Job is very loyal to the Christian family, though according to the narrator of "Uncle Willy" he also embodies Jefferson's "timid clinging to dull and rule-ridden-breathing" (239).

Born John Joseph Killion in Greenpoint, New York, he took the professional name of "Jake Kilrain" to protect his parents from the embarrassment of his questionable career as a prize fighter. He lost the heavy-weight championship to John L. Sullivan in a bare-knuckle fight that went 75 rounds in Richbourg, Mississippi, on August 7, 1889.

Born William Harrison Dempsey, "Jack" Dempsey was World Heavyweight boxing champion form 1921 to 1926 when he lost his title to Gene Tunney. His name is used in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses along with three other famous heavyweight boxers to measure how highly the hunters of Yoknapatawpha regard the dog Lion and the bear Old Ben as heavyweights and champions too.

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses this "man in uniform" (the story, 188) or "man in a uniform cap" (the novel, 222) approaches Boon in the washroom at the station in Memphis to tell him he he can't drink there, but in both texts, after looking "at Boon's face," he decides to say nothing. The cap suggests he may be a porter, in which case he'd be a Negro, but that isn't made explicit.

Hoke's is "a sawmill and a few stores" (188), apparently populated almost entirely by men. In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses most of these "wear muddy boots and khaki," indicating their status as mill workers (188, 218). The next day some "people from Hoke's" (189), called "sawmill men from Hoke's" in the novel (224), show up at the hunting camp, to participate in the hunt for Old Ben. Afterwards, they also bear witness to Lion's passing.

In "Lion," Quentin invokes the mystical powers of nameless Polynesian chiefs (who were looked upon as being "both more and less than men," 186) to show how absolute is Lion's rule over the other dogs in the hunting camp.

In "Lion," Boon Hogganbeck "busts past the doctor's wife when she opened the door" (196), demanding that the doctor go to the hunting camp to save the wounded Lion.

One of many of Faulkner's "boy" narrators, this twelve-year-old son of tenant farmers is more probably an adult when he tells this story about how Pat Stamper bested both his "Pap" and "Mammy." Although he is a sympathetic companion to his father, he is also a careful reporter and analyst of Pap's behavior. At least from his older perspective, he can see Pap's weaknesses for horse- and mule-trading, and for alcohol as well.

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet, these "neighbor men" are in the habit of dropping by to see what kind of horse Pap (in the short story) or Ab Snopes (in the novel) has "brung home this time" (119) - or "whatever it was he had done swapped for" (34). It's likely that at least most of these men are tenant farmers on the Holland land too.

In the last decades of his career Faulkner several times creates lists of the major family names in various parts of Yoknapatawpha. In Intruder in the Dust he identifies five family names with Frenchman's Bend and its environs: Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright (146).

The "old Abraham full of years" to whom Shreve compares Sutpen in Absalom! is obviously the Old Testament patriarch (260). That figure is best known as the mythic father of the covenant between God and His chosen people, and as the human father whose faith was so great that he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God's command. Shreve's "Abraham," however, seems entirely his own invention, who - in a quotation that sounds biblical but that Shreve makes up - "raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions" (260).

In Absalom! Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner. Beardsley's name is also mentioned in Light in August.

In Absalom!, Rosa's "spinster aunt" (46) lives with the Coldfields in Jefferson and, after Rosa's mother dies, raises the girl. According to Mr. Compson, this aunt is "that strong vindictive consistent woman who seems to have been twice the man that Mr. Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa's mother but her father too" (49). "A virgin at thirty-five," when Rosa is born, she brings Rosa up in a "closed masonry of females," defined by rage against "the entire male principle" in general and Thomas Sutpen in particular - at least according to Mr.

Goodhue Coldfield's grandfather never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen by noting that her father knew "who his grandfather had been in Virginia" (11).

Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first.

In Absalom! Jim Hamblett is the "justice" in the courthouse when Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned for fighting at the "negro ball" (164). In the middle of scolding the prisoner as "a white man" for stirring up racial ill-will at the time that the South seeks "to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor," he suddenly stops to ask the prisoner: "What are you?" (165).

The son Sutpen wants is only one of the two boys at the heart of his "design" in Absalom!. The other is referred to as "the boy-symbol at the door," another poor white child like the boy he himself once was in Tidewater, an "amazed and desperate child" whom he will take inside the front door of his big mansion and so "rive forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were" (210).

This is the second of the two sets of "half-breed servants" on the Haitian plantation in Absalom! (199).

This is the "someone else" in Absalom! who, Rosa says, was "kind enough" to tell her Sutpen was dead (139).

Several real Confederate officers are mentioned by name in Absalom!. They have their own entries. This entry represents the larger, anonymous group of men who lead the Confederate Army through the Civil War. Like so many other characters in the novel, they are seen differently from different points of view. In Chapter 1, to Rosa Coldfield, who writes "poems, ode eulogy and epitaph" to many of them, they are "a few figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" (13).

The "County Medical Officer" in Absalom! tells General Compson that Charles E. S-V. Bon and Judith Sutpen have yellow fever (170).

In Absalom! Shreve describes the people who shop at the "little crossroads store" that Sutpen opens after the Civil War as "a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash)" (147). As at other country stores in Faulkner's world, there are often "lounging men" on the front porch, but here the "customers and loungers" are racially mixed: "rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes" (149), "the black and the white" (227).

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).

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).

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.

Historically, Haitian slavery was abolished and French ownership of land forbidden by law before Sutpen was born. Absalom! represents the people who rise up against the rule of the French sugar planter so symbolically that it is impossible to know if it sees them as enslaved or not, though it's likely that in Faulkner's mind their uprising is a slave rebellion. Before the rebellion they are depicted as the unseen sound of "the drums and the chanting" at night (202), and a "blank wall of black secret faces, a wall behind which almost anything could be preparing to happen" (203).

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).

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.

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).

In Absalom! the "first black man, slave," that Sutpen ever sees is this "huge bull" of a man who throws his drunken father out of a "doggery," a rough tavern, in the middle of the family's journey across Virginia (182). The man's description focuses on his "mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones" (182).

In Absalom!, after Rosa Coldfield returns to her house in Jefferson in 1866, "the town - farmers passing, negro servants going to work in white kitchens" - see her raiding the neighbors' gardens "before sunup" (138). "The town" is often a kind of character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the way this passage identifies the town with "farmers" (who are from the country) and "servants" (who are not white) is exceptional.

At the New Orleans dueling establishment Bon takes Henry to in Absalom!, the door is opened by "a swarthy man resembling a creature out of an old woodcut of the French Revolution" (89); he speaks with Bon in French.

In Absalom!, Rosa has a moment of fantasy while standing in the hallway of "rotting" Sutpen mansion where Bon's body lies; in this never-to-be version of the Sutpen story, all is well, and Rosa can hear "the children" of Judith and Charles Bon in "the nursery" (113).

In Absalom! Sutpen negotiates his acquisition of land "with or through" the "Chickasaw Indian agent" (25). The adjective is ambiguous, but it's unlikely the agent was a Chickasaw himself. Historically, Indian agents were white men who worked for the U.S. government as the official intermediary between white America and Native Americans.

In Sutpen's account of life in the mountains of western Virginia in Absalom!, "the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights" (179).

In Absalom!, this man - whom Rosa calls a "fool" (17) - tries to stop Sutpen's coachman from beating the horses.

In Absalom!, Judith Sutpen finds a buyer for the crossroads store about a year after her father's death. The man himself never appears in the novel, but the money he pays her is used to buy at least one and possibly two of the tombstones in the Sutpen's graveyard.

The "band [that] plays Dixie" which Shreve imagines in Absalom! is part of a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262).

Also called "a posse" (35), the "vigilance committee" in Absalom! that accompanies the county sheriff when he confronts Sutpen on suspicion of theft originally consists of "eight or ten" men (34). In an essentially comic scene, this group follows Sutpen on his courtship errand as their numbers grow (according to General Compson) to "almost fifty" men (35) - including "other horsemen [who] rode into the square" and "others who did not happen to have horses" (35) as well as some of the men who were lounging "on the gallery of the Holston House" when Sutpen reached town (34).

When in Absalom! Sutpen realizes that the French architect has run away, he sends word to General Compson "and some others" in town; these "others" are the "guests" who are invited to witness or take part in the "race" to recapture the runaway, as if it were an entertainment (177, 178, 206). Compson brings champagne, "and some of the others brought whiskey" (178). They are wealthy enough to ride horses. In Sutpen's mind, these men will expect him to track the man with dogs (178).

In Absalom! Sutpen tells General Compson that his first father-in-law's wife "had been a Spaniard" (203); much later in the novel he tells his son Henry that in fact, as he discovered after marrying, she "was part negro" (283). The Chronology at the end of the novel treats her mixed racial identity as a fact - "Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood" (305) - but the actual novel does not independently confirm it. This woman never appears in the novel herself, apparently having died before Sutpen gets involved with her husband and daughter.

In Absalom! Rosa Coldfield orders "casual negro boys who happened to pass the house" to "rake her yard" (171-72); they understand that they will be paid later by Judge Benbow.

These are the "negroes" at the "ball" in Absalom! where Charles E. S-V. Bon starts a fight (164). Before the fight they are described as "dancing" and having a "dice game in the kitchen"; in the fight they are described as "a moiling clump of negro backs and heads and black arms and hands clutching sticks of stove wood and cooking implements and razors" (164).

When Clytemnestra and Charles E. S-V. Bon take a steamboat from New Orleans in Absalom!, they travel "on the freight deck, eating and sleeping with negroes" (160).

In Absalom! these are the "Northern people" who, at least in Miss Rosa's mind, have destroyed "the South" (5).