Character Keys

This "negro in overalls" is the second driver in The Sound and the Fury: he agrees to drive Jason from Mottson back to Jefferson for four dollars (313).

One of two Negro drivers in The Town. He drives Uncle Billy around in Jody Varner's car.

When Mrs. McKellogg takes the young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" back to what he calls "her house" (obviously, an apartment house, 97), he notes that the "little room without nothing in it" (obviously an elevator) is operated by "a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had" (obviously the operator, 97). With the exception of the narrator's reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the Negro employees of the apartment building provide the story's only (linguistically racist) mention of race.

In keeping with entrenched traditions, the Holston House in The Mansion still has "Negro man waiters," some of whom are the sons of previous generations of waiters (421), and in the ladies dressing room there is "a maid" (422).

In The Town young Bayard has to swerve his car to avoid hitting this "Negro family in a wagon" (124). (In Faulkner's first account of this accident, in Flags in the Dust, Bayard swerves to avoid a white man driving a Ford.)

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.)

The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit.

Driving out to the Caledonia cemetery on the Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust, Chick sees only a single Negro: a man plowing one of the fields along the road, "the face black and gleam[ing] with sweat and passionate with effort, tense concentrated and composed" (145). The white boy and the black man look "eye to eye into each other's face before the Negro looks away" (145).

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 Reivers the Sheriff says that Boon's white friends can "settle" the problem caused by his accidental shooting of a "Negro girl" by "giving her father ten dollars" (15). The father himself does not appear in the text.

In The Hamlet Ratliff's revulsion at the idea of Eula Varner being married to Flem Snopes leads him to imagine what Flem's idea of sex is; the result is a disturbing image that probably tells us more about Ratliff than about Flem or anyone else: sex as a kind of business transaction with a "black brute from the field with the field sweat still drying on her" (181) who wants "a nickel's worth of lard" from the store (180).

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.)

At the gas station where Jason stops after leaving the Sheriff's house in The Sound and the Fury, this Negro employee fills Jason's tank with gas and his tires with air.

In Light in August this Negro girl is induced to have sex with a group of five white country boys in a deserted sawmill shed. When it is Joe's turn, he sees "something, prone, abject; in her eyes perhaps" (156), and his response is to beat her until the other boys restrain him.

According to the brief and ambiguous account in The Mansion, while growing up white and male in Frenchman's Bend Mink Snopes has sex with a least one black girl: the "furious unplanned episodes" with an "almost invisible unwashed Negro girl" in a roadside ditch or the middle of a cotton field (317).

In "Knight's Gambit" this is the specific groom among the various stablemen who work for Sebastian Gualdres who is in charge of his blind "night horse"; Gauldres tells Gavin Stevens that this mare "is left in the stable by the negrito each afternoon" (227).

The "headman" among the slaves in "Red Leaves" tells the servant Issetibbeha is still alive, and offers him food (332).

In The Hamlet this hostler finds the rented horse and buggy that the drummer who was courting Eula abandoned when he fled Yoknapatawpha.

In The Mansion Mink remembers that when he was younger there was a Negro in "the lot behind the Commercial Hotel" who would feed his mule for a quarter while he took the train to Memphis (313).

The "negro porter of the hotel" where Ruby stays in Sanctuary (135) briefly appears in three separate scenes: showing Ruby to her room in Chapter 16, fetching Horace to the hotel in Chapter 17, and showing Horace where he can wait for a train in Chapter 29. Faulkner may have been thinking of one man in all three cases, or two, or three.

Major de Spain's house servant in "Barn Burning" is "an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a linen jacket" (11). He tries to prevent Ab Snopes from entering the De Spain mansion, and then - unsuccessfully - orders Ab to "Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here. Major ain't home nohow" (11). At the end of the story, when Sarty bursts into the mansion to warn Major de Spain, this house servant is the first person that he encounters.

In "The Old People" and again in Go Down, Moses, this group of Negro hunters see "the sudden burst of flame" as Jobaker's hut burns down (204, 164). In the short story they are explicitly described as "possum-hunting" (204); in the novel they are just "hunting" (164).

This man never appears in Light in August; he loses his shoes when his wife swaps "her husband's brogans which she was wearing at the time" for the shoes Joe Christmas is wearing (329).

Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.)

This infant, described only as "a baby, a few months old," is seen in the arms of the self-emancipated Negro whom Rosa and her party encounter on their way to Hawkhurst.

"Somewhere down the corridor" of the Alabama jail where Popeye awaits trial for murder in Sanctuary "a negro was singing" (310) - not unlike the "negro murderer" who is awaiting his execution in the Jefferson jail where Lee awaits his trial much earlier (114).

In The Hamlet the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes are described as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285).

The five other black men in the county jail where Lucas is held in Intruder in the Dust are described by the narrative as the "crap-shooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers" who are kept in a single large room on the second floor (30). Some of these Negro prisoners are assigned to what the narrative calls the "street gang" that works outside the jail maintaining town property (54).

In her account of Nancy's arrest in Requiem for a Nun, Temple describes in moving detail the "Negro prisoners" whose hands can be seen lying between the bars of the jail's windows. Initially she describes them as "the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murdresses too," but her representation of them also includes the kinds of labor and domestic work they perform (plowing and rocking cradles and so on) as a crucial part of Yoknapatawpha's economy (155). She compares them to the more privileged "white persons" (155).

In The Town, this man works at the Bank of Jefferson, where he "sweeps the floor every morning" (290).

In The Mansion Res Snopes employs "a hired Negro" to help him build a fence (363).

Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun" begins by evoking the "Negro women" who used to carry the clothes they had washed for their white customers in bundles on their heads (289); now they fetch and deliver it in automobiles or have lost their jobs to commercial laundry services.

In Light in August Joanna Burden conducts a steady and voluminous correspondence with "the presidents and faculties and trustees" and "young girl students and even alumnae" of various southern Negro schools and colleges. In her replies Joanna sends them "advice, business, financial and religions" and "advice personal and practical" (233).

In The Reivers this "uniformed maid" helps serve supper at Colonel Linscomb's (277).

The mammy who takes care of Narcissa and Bayard's new-born son at the end of Flags in the Dust is referred to only as "the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours" (395).

This is the man in Flags in the Dust who provides Byron Snopes with the Ford car in which he flees Yokapatawpha after robbing the bank. He is identified simply as "the negro [Byron] sought," and Byron finds him just off the Square, on a "street occupied by negro stores and barber shops" (272).

This is the "inscrutable" man in Light in August - "either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth" (435) - who takes Lucas Burch's note to the sheriff. A bit later, this man points Byron Bunch toward Burch.

An unspecified number of black men are present in the hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Their role in the annual hunt is to cook and do other odd jobs around the camp. As blacks and as servants, they tend to be ignored or not noticed by the white hunters except when they are sought for some reason, as happens when Major de Spain calls for Old Man Ash to fetch him a drink when Ash has gone to the Indian mound. One of these other black servants appears with the "demijohn and fixings" and reports that Ash has gone "up to'ds de mound" (74).

These "two shabby negro men" in Sanctuary whom Clarence, Virgil and Fonzo see arguing with a white man in the hallway of the Negro brothel in Memphis; they may work there (as bouncers, perhaps), or may be customers themselves (198).

In "Smoke" Granby Dodge sends this man to ascertain from Gavin Stevens “if the way in which a man died could affect the probation of his will” (36).

This is the young black man in "Barn Burning" whom Abner Snopes sends to Mr. Harris to tell him that "wood and hay kin burn" (4) - Ab's barely disguised way of threatening to burn Harris' barn. This messenger never appears directly. In his testimony against Ab, Harris calls him a "strange nigger" (4), a term that in the context of the story and the South at that time means he is a black person whom Harris has never seen before.

In Go Down, Moses Lucas recalls this earlier source of competition for his moonshine business. Lucas takes a kind of pleasure in remembering how he got this man sentenced to prison.

While hiding in the stable, the servant in "Red Leaves" imagines the scene of the other slaves drumming and dancing three miles away at the river. Included in the scene are the "women with nursing children," feeding them from "their heavy sluggish breasts"; they are described as "contemplative" and "oblivious of the drumming" (329).

This is the "wife" of the convicted murderer who is in the jail when Goodwin is arrested (114). While Sanctuary never gives her a name, or explains why her husband killed her, the narrative does provide a very vivid description of her death.

One of the "three negroes" in Flags in the Dust who accompany Young Bayard on his drunken trip to the neighboring college town to serenade the co-eds. He plays either the bass viol or the guitar.

Near the conclusion of "Centaur in Brass" Faulkner reveals that Flem Snopes lives in a bungalow on the bedraggled outskirts of town in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168).

The nursemaid who takes care of Mrs. Harriss' son Max in "Knight's Gambit" is "a light-colored Negress a good deal smarter, or at least snappier-looking than any other woman white or black either in Jefferson" (158). The Mansion also refers to this character as "the nurse," but does not otherwise describe her (217).

When he describes his situation on the verge of launching the forbidden trip to Memphis in The Reivers, Lucius says "I was in the position of the old Negro who said, 'Here I is, Lord. . . ." (62). He (or Faulkner) may have a specific person in mind, but this tempted black man seems more like the product of Lucius' imagination, and a suggestive one at that.