Character Keys

The Negro slaves owned by the Indian tribe in "Red Leaves" are described almost exclusively as a group: "a single octopus. They were like the roots of huge tree uncovered, the earth momentarily upon . . . its lightless and outraged life" (315). They adhere to their African customs, and keep ceremonial artifacts in the central cabin. The narrative characterizes them chiefly by their "fear" and "smell" (315), and the various rituals, including drumming and dancing, they practice.

In Sanctuary Ruby mentions the various black maids to whom she used to give nightdresses "after one night" wearing them in her work as a prostitute (75).

In The Hamlet the fancy buggy that was once used to court Eula Varner ends up as the property of "a negro farm-hand" who eventually marries and "gets a family" (165).

In Light in August someone called the "word-of-mouth messenger" brings news of Nathaniel from Colorado to the Burdens living at that time somewhere west of St. Louis (243).

The second of the Negroes whom Hightower hires to cook for him is a man. Although there are white households with only one servant in the fictions, where the servant is a male, this is the only instance in the fictions when a male servant is specifically identified as a domestic cook. It is the result of an exceptional circumstance. After Hightower's wife commits suicide, "masked men" scare off the light-skinned Negro woman who cooks for him (71).

In "Shall Not Perish" the narrator recalls, briefly, how Rosa Millard bravely "stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war" (112). Usually, carpetbaggers are associated with the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, while in The Unvanquished Rosa dies before the end of the war.

The "Negro waiter" in The Reivers who waits on the few guests at the Parsham hotel is described as "temporary" (190, 193).

In Sanctuary during his train trip to Oxford, Horace rides on three different "whites only" cars, but on the first of these he takes a look into "the jim crow car" coupled to it (168). What he sees are "hatted cannonballs [the heads of the black passengers] swaying in unison" amid the "gusts of talk and laughter" (168). (Under the South's Jim Crow laws, as the phrase is usually written, train passengers were racially segregated.)

The various townspeople whom Pap and his son encounter during their brief visit to Jefferson in "Fool about a Horse" will probably remember the pair vividly. A group of pedestrians on the street has to "scatter" when the runaway mules come "swurging" into town (128), and another group in the alley behind the hardware store is treated to the sight of those same two mules apparently trying to hang themselves by their reins, like people "in one of these here suicide packs" (129). This second crowd is also described "all watching" as Pap and his son get ready to leave (129).

According to Ratliff in The Town, Wilbur Provine "was really a Snopes" - which is another way of casting aspersions on his character. Provine runs "a still in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house" (177). The judge at his trial for moonshining gives him a five-year sentence for making whiskey - and for making his wife walk so far to fetch water for their home.

In The Mansion this police officer makes Mink move from the bench at Court Square, but also gives him fifty cents so he can "find a bed" (316).

The Justice of the Peace in Whiteleaf who presides over the trials Armstid vs. Snopes and Tull vs. Snopes in The Hamlet is a "neat, small, plump old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers who ever breathed" (357). With "neat, faintly curling white hair," he wears "steel-framed spectacles" overtop of "lens-distorted and irisless" eyes (357-8).

When Boon and Butch are taken to jail in Hardwich in The Reivers, Reba and Corrie stay in "the jailor's wife's room" (270). The phrasing suggests that, like the jailer in Jefferson in other fictions, this couple lives in the building that holds the jail.

In addition to the present day jailer, Mr. Tubbs, Intruder in the Dust mentions but doesn't name the man who was the county jailer during the Civil War. Like Tubbs, he lived with his family in the jail. (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," Intruder in the Dust and "An Error in Chemistry" but with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

In the revised version of "Delta Autumn" that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin sees this "Negro man" "sitting in the stern" of the boat that brought the young woman to the camp (277). The boat is his, and he is the woman's "cousin," though unlike hers, his race is immediately apparent (278). When Ike learns that the young woman is descended from James Beauchamp, he might have realized that this cousin of hers is also a relative of his - part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family - but that is not made explicit in the chapter.

The young woman in "Delta Autumn" identifies the man in the boat that takes her to the hunting camp as her "cousin," but beyond that the story provides no details about the aunt's "family" in Vicksburg with whom she has been staying (278). (In the revised version of the story that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, this family is part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family.)

In The Mansion Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children" are sent back to Jefferson and end up wreaking havoc (327). That story is told in detail in The Town, where they are somewhat more clearly individualized: one, probably the oldest, is a girl, two are boys, while no one is sure about the sex of the youngest. (See the entries for Byron Snopes' Daughter, Bryron Snopes' Son(1), Byron Snopes' Son(2) and Byron Snopes' Youngest Child in this index.)

The unnamed father of Caddy Compson's child is referred to in the "Appendix: Compson" (1946) only as "another man" than the man she married (332). She is "two months pregnant" with his child when she marries that husband. This 'other man' may be Dalton Ames, who is not mentioned in the "Appendix" but is Caddy's first sexual partner in The Sound and the Fury (1929). However, when in that novel Caddy's brother Quentin asks her in the context of her forthcoming marriage how many sexual partners she has had, she replies "I dont know too many" (115).

Very little can be said definitively about the two men in As I Lay Dying who apprehend Darl (which help from Jewel and Dewey Dell) and then, the next morning, take him in custody on the train to the state mental hospital in Jackson. Though they never speak, they are presumably state employees. They both carry guns, and have new, crisp haircuts.

In As I Lay Dying, according to Albert's report, the people of Mottson who react to the smell from the Bundrens' wagon include "ladies" rushing away "with handkerchiefs to their noses, and a "crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon" (203).

In Go Down, Moses, these three men help Tennie's Jim hold the "Texas paint pony" still for Ike and Boon (220).

The Negroes who live in the "negro cabins" at the southern edge of town appear in As I Lay Dying mainly as the "faces" that "come suddenly to the doors, white-eyed," as the Bundrens pass by with their malodorous burden (229).

The man lives at the place outside Mottson where the Bundren’s stop to mix cement for Cash's leg in As I Lay Dying. He loans them a bucket, but after smelling the corpse they are carrying retreats to watch them from his porch.

The drugstore in Jefferson appears in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but it is not identified with an owner with any consistency. So in As I Lay Dying the pharmacist who is at lunch when Dewey Dell walks into the drugstore, the employer whom MacGowan refers to as "the old man" and "the old bastard," has to remain unnamed (242, 247). He clearly does not know about MacGowan's unethical behavior.

The character named George who appears in The Hamlet is one of the deputies who help the Sheriff capture Mink. He objects to the Sheriff's decision to take Mink to jail by a back route.

The 'bailiff' who appears in Intruder in the Dust is a product of Chick Mallison's imagination, as he fantasizes about how the character of the white population of Beat Four might be put on trial.

In The Town, as the florist in Jefferson, "Mrs Rouncewell" gives her name to a memorable event in Jefferson history, the "Mrs Rouncewell panic" (81). This ensues when her shop runs out of flowers before a major dance. "She ran the flower shop; not . . . because she loved flowers nor even because she loved money but because she loved funerals; she had buried two husbands herself and took the second one's insurance and opened the flower shop and furnished the flowers for every funeral in Jefferson since" (73). In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Mansion, Mrs.

Hoake McCarron's father makes a dashing figure in The Hamlet: a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman.

As "Tom-Tom" in "Centaur in Brass" and as "Tom Tom" in The Town, he works as the day fireman for Jefferson's power plant. (In this context a 'fireman' is someone who keeps a fire in a boiler burning, not one who puts fires out.) In both texts he is a "big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds, "sixty years old," and married to a young wife he maintains "with the strict jealous seclusion of a Turk in a cabin about two miles down the railroad track from the plant" (16, 152).

The mother of the mail rider in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun was "from old Ferginny" (23). When she named her son "Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew," hoping that that famous name might bring her son some "luck," she also indirectly provided the county seat of Yoknapatawpha with its name (23).

In "Knight's Gambit" Sebastian Gualdres is "the Argentine cavalry captain" whom Mrs. Harriss and her children meet in South America after Mr. Harriss’s death (170). He is one of the more exotic figures to appear in Yoknapatawpha. The narrative notes the stereotypical assumptions that the people of Yoknapatawpha have about him as "a Latin" (174), but in its depiction of his courtesy, his pride and his machismo, the narrative itself seems not unwilling to reinforce the stereotypes.

In The Mansion the name "Turpin" comes up in two different chronological contexts. Both are associated with Frenchman's Bend, but this is the earlier of the two, the "Turpin" who is listed among the five local young men who are courting Eula Varner in the early 20th century (133).

The men who run the company that makes or markets the metal detector Lucas orders work in "St. Louis" (spelled that way in "Gold Is Not Always," 228, but inaccurately as "Saint Louis" in Go Down, Moses, 79) do not appear directly in the text. The salesman whom they send to Yoknapatawpha gives us a good idea of their strictly capitalist ethic when he expresses disbelief that these executives would "send this machine out without any down payment" (228, 78).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses the "United States Attorney" who is present during Judge Gowan's hearing on the case against Lucas and George is an outsider who "moved to Jefferson only after the administration changed eight years ago" (222, 70). This probably makes him an appointee of President Franklin Roosevelt, though that is not said explicitly. He is described as both "angry-looking" (221, 70) and "angry" (222, 71). Secure in his local knowledge and authority, Judge Gowan ignores his one exasperated but uncompleted remark.

The "regular customers" for Lucas Beauchamp's moonshine - whom he thinks of in "A Point of Law" as his "established clientele" (213-14) and in Go Down, Moses as his "established trade" (35) - are not described in either text. It can safely be assumed from the other fictions that all are male. And given the way moonshine is bought and consumed throughout Faulkner's fiction, it is probably safe to assume they are of both races and from various levels of Yoknapatawpha society.

Although we never learn the name of the "commissioner" mentioned in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, or much else about him, we know the man who signs the indictments against Lucas and George for moonshining is a federal official - his office is in "the federal courthouse" (216), and moonshining was a federal crime.

Typically, the "Chancery Clerk" mentioned by the narrator of "The Old People" would have been elected to his position (204) . His job would include collecting demographic data and presiding over the chancery court records, which mainly dealt with disputes about property and contracts adjudicated in the court. (Curiously, all mention of this person is gone from the version of the story Faulkner includes in Go Down, Moses: there the phrase is "chancery book in Jefferson," 163).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the crowd that watches as the coffin carrying Samuel Beauchamp is taken off the train contains a "number of Negroes and whites both" (265, 363). The Negroes include "men and women too," but the white people there are described as "idle white men and youths and small boys"; there do not seem to be any white women among the spectators (265, 363).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the crowd that watches as the coffin carrying Samuel Beauchamp is taken off the train contains a "number of Negroes and whites both" (265, 363). These are the "probably half a hundred Negroes, men and women too," who are there (265, 363).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp was represented at his murder trial by a "good lawyer" (260, 357), at least according to what Gavin Stevens' learns from his calls to the Joliet prison warden and the Chicago district attorney. In his comment in the novel, however, Gavin adds the phrase "of that sort" (357). The text, however, does not explain what "sort" of lawyer he is thinking of.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin Stevens calls an undertaker in Joliet, Illinois, to arrange for Samuel Beauchamp's body to be sent back to Jefferson after the execution.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Belle Worsham tells Gavin Stevens that the "parents" of Mollie and Hamp Worsham were slaves who "belonged to my grandfather" (260, 357). His last name is probably Worsham, but that is not specified.

In Go Down, Moses, Miss Worsham tells Gavin Stevens that the "parents" of Mollie Beauchamp "belonged to my grandfather," which means of course that they were enslaved (357). In Intruder in the Dust - where Mollie is named Molly again, Miss Worsham is named Miss Habersham, and Molly's father is not mentioned - the reference to Molly's mother adds the detail that both Molly and Miss Habersham "suckled at Molly's mother's breast" (85).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp is convicted of and executed for shooting and killing a "Chicago policeman" (259, 356).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the worker for the 1940 U.S. census who visits Samuel Beauchamp in the penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, is described as a "spectacled young white man" with a "broad census taker's portfolio" (256, 351). He is a "year or two younger" than Butch Beauchamp, and he has probably never been wealthy, since the shoes Beauchamp wears are described as "better than the census taker had ever owned" (257, 352).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, this woman is a member of the same social club as the deputy's wife. She insists on a "recount of the scores" of the card game that the wife thought she had won (252, 147).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider is the head of "a mill gang" at the sawmill (239, 129). These other Negroes attend Mannie's funeral, and several of them try to help him in his grief. Some of them are also among the workers who shoot dice after hours at the mill.

According to the coroner's official report in "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider dies "at the hands of a person or persons unknown" (252, 147), though the deputy's narration leaves little doubt that at least many of the lynchers are members of the Birdsong clan.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the fireman who keeps the fire burning at the sawmill is described as "an older man" (243, 136). He shares his breakfast with Rider.