Character Keys

This is the group in The Hamlet whom Lump Snopes refers to as "a few of the boys" (258). They don't appear directly in the narrative, but Lump tells Mink his plan to take these young white men one night to the home of the Negro who found Mink's shotgun, and terrify him "with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet" in order to force him to admit, falsely, that he stole the gun (258).

In The Hamlet these men oversee the convict laborers at the logging camp (262).

In The Hamlet this apprentice helps Trumbull and Varner's blacksmith overhaul the machinery of the cotton gin (65).

The brother-in-law of Labove's Oxford landlady in The Hamlet gives her sweet potatoes as a treat.

In The Hamlet Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

The University of Mississippi "classics professor" for whom Labove did menial work in The Hamlet rewarded him with "an original Horace and a Thucydides" (122).

As the Sheriff and his deputies take Mink to jail in The Hamlet, they see "cotton pickers" working the fields around Whiteleaf store (283); though they are not described, it's likely that the pickers are black.

According to the narrator of The Hamlet, "county officers do not bother [the people of Frenchman's Bend] at all save in the heel of election years" (5). The reference is to 'peace officers,' i.e. policemen, though in Yoknapatawpha the term 'police' is rarely used to describe the county's sheriffs and deputies or the marshals in the town. The county sheriffs all are elected, which explains the last part of that quotation, but in fact the novel shows them doing their job in Frenchman's Bend, at least when Houston is murdered.

These are the "spectators" in The Hamlet who show up to watch the legal proceedings that result from the "Texas Sickness" - the auction of the wild ponies and its aftermath. They are described as "the men, the women, the children, sober, attentive, and neat, not in their Sunday clothes to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that morning" (356).

In The Hamlet this distant kinsman's wife's cousin puts Ratliff up for the night and buys a sewing machine from him.

In the fantasy of Flem in hell in The Hamlet, these minions - the text refers to them only as "they" and "them" (166) - carry messages between their master and Snopes. One of them is individualized as an "old fellow" who "used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy" (168), but none of them are described. The dialect in which they speak is one that is conventionally associated with the lower class and the rural south: Flem's soul, they say, "wasn't no big one to begin with nohow" (166).

This "resident of the village" of Frenchman's Bend is the first of many men, white and black, to whom Flem Snopes lends money in The Hamlet (67).

In The Hamlet this drover tells Alison Hoake McCarron of her husband's death (150). A "drover" is someone who drives herds of cattle, from pasture to pasture or from farm to market, and so on.

This good Samaritan in The Hamlet brings Eula home after the salesman who has been courting her took her to a dance in "a schoolhouse about eight miles away" - "and vanished" (147).

In The Hamlet the father of one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who courted Eula before her marriage eventually sells his son's neglected buggy to a "negro farm-hand" (165).

The father of Eck Snopes' first wife is unnamed, despite the fact that his "name" figures in The Hamlet. This needs explaining, and the text does try to do that. Eck's (also unnamed) wife dies sometime after the child is born, and her mother, according to Eck, began calling him "after his grandpa" - that is, presumably, her husband (295). But (as Eck 'explains') "he never had no actual name," and we never learn what his grandmother called him (295). (This is the child who eventually gets called "Wallstreet Panic Snopes.")

These "federal officers" would usually be called 'revenuers' (5). According to The Hamlet, as the Old Frenchman's original plantation falls into decay after the Civil War, the area that becomes known as Frenchman's Bend transforms into an enclosed back country effectively outside the reach of government authorities.

In The Hamlet Labove joins the university's football team; none of his teammates are individualized.

After Houston returns to Yoknapatawpha in The Hamlet, he sometimes meets the "contemporaries" who remember him from the "youth" they shared, with whom he still occasionally gets together for "drinks or cards" (237).

This is the woman whom The Hamlet refers to as the "curl-papered landlady" in El Paso who tries to prevent Jack Houston from taking the woman who becomes his common law wife away from her house - but since the woman is a prostitute and the place the landlady runs is a brothel, it seems clear that "landlady" is a euphemism for 'madam' (234).

This is the "doctor or officer" - Labove, who witnesses the event in The Hamlet, "does not know" which - who attends to a dying Negro who has been shot at on "a bleak station platform" at an unnamed location (138).

In The Town this man is hired by I.O. Snopes to lead the newly arrived mules from the depot to the lot near Mrs Hait's home.

These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers.

This teacher at the "agricultural college" that Labove briefly attends lurks inside the way The Hamlet describes the woman with whom Labove has an affair as "the wife of a minor instructor" (151).

The man in The Hamlet who makes a joke accusing Mink Snopes' wife of prostitution is described as "a town wit" (289).

Part of the time Ratliff is away from Yoknapatawpha in The Hamlet is spent selling sewing machines in Tennessee; there he spends time with "a distant kinsman" - i.e. someone to whom he is distantly related - who owes him money (61).

Following Labove's admission to the Bar in The Hamlet, these men are present at the celebration for the graduating class in a hotel dining room.

In The Hamlet Ratliff asks this man in Columbia, Tennessee, about "the whereabouts of his [Ratliff's] cousin," and sells him a sewing machine (61).

In The Hamlet this doctor operates upon V.K. Ratliff, cutting the "right thing out whether by accident or design" (80).

These men are sitting on the store porch when Ab and Ratliff drive past in The Hamlet; they may have been the ones who told Ab that "Pat Stamper was in Jefferson that day" (38).

In The Hamlet there are always groups of men hanging around Frenchman's Bend's more public spaces, like Varner's various businesses or Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house. Some members appear somewhat individualized, such as with the "man with the peach spray" (343) who discusses the horse auction and its consequences with a "second" and a "third" among the group at Varner's store, although each remains virtually indistinct, members of a communal group who interact with well-defined characters like Varner, Ratliff, Quick, Bookwright, Freeman and the various Snopeses.

In The Hamlet Will Varner mentions that his "mammy" once heard an old woman explain that the way a pregnant woman can make sure she has a girl is to "show her belly to the full moon" (339). "Mammy" often implies a black woman, but in this case it seems more likely that Will is talking about his own mother. (The word occurs in a passage thick with his rural vernacular: "I mind me when" "done married and moved," "passel of boys," etc.; 339.)

This young black was Hoake McCarron's sole companion growing up. Many of Faulkner's wealthier white men had Negro companions and personal servants as boys; the way this kind of relationship plays out in The Hamlet is atypical, to say the least. When the boys are 6-8 years old, Hoake "conquers the negro with his fists in a fair fight" (150). Later he "pays the negro" at a fixed rate "for the privilege of whipping [him] . . . with a miniature riding crop" (151).

In The Hamlet this farmhand buys the buggy that was used by one of Eula's suitors and drives it through the village "a few times each year" (165).

In The Hamlet this man works at Varner's cotton gin, and helps Trumbull overhaul the machinery (65). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

This man in The Hamlet advises another fireman who wants to borrow money from Flem Snopes, though he doesn't seem to understand how much the interest Flem has been charging him for "two years" is costing him (78). (He is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

This man is a tenant farmer who works land owned by Jack Houston's father. In The Hamlet Jack Houston engages in a relationship with his daughter (228).

This entry represents the two groups of Negroes who are connected with the Hoake family in The Hamlet: the "negro field hands" who work on the farm (149) and the "negro servants" who work inside the house, and with whom Alison Hoake McCarron leaves her nine-year-old boy when she goes to bring her husband's body home (150).

When Mink is jailed in Jefferson in The Hamlet, Ratliff invites Mink's wife and two children to stay in the house owned by him and his sister. The two Snopes children are "dressed in cast-off garments of his [Ratliff's] nephews and nieces" (288) when their mother takes them to visit their father in jail.

According to Varner in The Hamlet, this "old woman" told his "mammy" that if "a woman showed her belly to the full moon," she would have "a gal" (339).

This is the crowd at the "bleak" railroad station in The Hamlet where Labove sees a white man shoot a black man; it "scatters" as the shooting occurs, then forms a "crowd" around the Negro so dense that Labove has to "use his football tactics" to move through it. Some of them also "overpower and disarm" the white man (138).

Like a number of crowds or groups of people in The Hamlet, the folks who ride various wagons on various roads in and around Frenchman's Bend cannot be individualized or broken up into smaller groups.

The owner of the logging camp where Mink works in The Hamlet "lives openly" with a quadroon woman "most of whose teeth were gold" and who superintends the kitchen (262). (The term 'quadroon' appears in a lot of American literature before the Civil Rights movement; it was used to label a person with three white and one black grandparents. Faulkner scholarship uses the term to identify the woman in Absalom, Absalom! with whom Charles Bon has a child, but we identify her in this index as Mrs. Charles Bon.)

In The Hamlet the orphaned Lucy Pate was raised by this remote relation; she imbued Lucy with the "domestic skill" of a "country heritage" and the values of "constancy and devotion" (227).

In The Hamlet Ratliff's widowed sister keeps house for him in Jefferson. Neither her first nor her married name is mentioned. While there is little to define her physical appearance, Faulkner describes her "mute and outraged righteousness" when she is forced to live with Mink Snopes' wife and her two children (286). She is offended that Ratliff permits Mink's wife to do some of the housework (287).

This entry represents the children of Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet who attend the local school at various times, from Reconstruction to the novel's present day. According to the narrator, these boys and girls walk "back and forth in all weathers" (108) to the community schoolhouse. Many of these schoolchildren have no use for the institution at all, especially for their alcoholic professor. When Labove takes over the school, he instills discipline among the students and has a number of the "older boys" (124) build a basketball court.

The tenant farmers on Varner's properties in The Hamlet are described as "patient earth-reeking men" who meet with their landlord each year after they have gathered the crop they raised on his land "to accept almost without question whatever Varner should compute he owed them for their year's work" (67).

Throughout The Hamlet there is a steady flow of tradesmen, drummers, farmers, and other wayfarers who stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's. This entry represents the majority of them, who are not individualized in any way.

The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).