Character Keys

He is the doctor consulted in Go Down, Moses after Molly Beauchamp is found unconscious along the creek (120).

Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.

In the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses Wyatt joins Will Legate, Roth Edmonds, and Ike McCaslin and some other men from Yoknapatawpha on the hunting trip to the Delta. There are five other 'Wyatts' in four other Yoknapatawpha fictions, but how or if Henry is related to any of them is never mentioned.

The archaeologists mentioned in Go Down, Moses are "a group of white men, including two women," who descend on the Indian mound to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37).

This "aunt" (68) in Vicksburg whom Nat visits in Go Down, Moses is only mentioned once, when Nat tells Roth Edmonds about her trip. Based on the rest of the novel, it's hard to know how this aunt is related to either of Nat's parents, Molly or Lucas.

In Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin meets with this man in the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time. He is describe as a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like Ike's father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War (267).

After Ike renounces his inheritance in Go Down, Moses, he and his wife live for a time in a boarding house in Jefferson whose other tenants are described as "petit juries," countrymen in town to serve as jurors "during court terms," and "itinerant horse- and mule-traders" (285).

The black woman who cooks Roth's food does not appear directly in Go Down, Moses, but he does speak to her "through the kitchen door" when he wants her to bring Lucas into the house (125).

The three paragraph introductory to Go Down, Moses says that "some of the descendants" of the former McCaslin slaves are named McCaslin (5), but curiously no such characters appear in the rest of the story. There the family name of the many people who are descendants of Carothers McCaslin and his slaves is Beauchamp. (There are some of these descendants named McCaslin in The Reivers, published twenty years after Moses.)

An A[rmy] P[rovost] M[arshal] is the head of a unit of military police. This "Federal A.P.M." in Go Down, Moses is one of the Yankee troops who are stationed in Mississippi as part of the post-war Reconstruction (277). He has a black mistress, the sister of Sickymo, which is why he ensures that Sickymo is made a marshal in Jefferson.

As part of his description in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, Ike McCaslin imagines "women crouched with huddled children behind locked doors," seeking shelter from threats that are not named in the text, but are clearly meant to be understood as a consequence of the defeat of the (white) South and the emancipation of the (black) South (277).

One of Roth Edmonds' grievances against Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses is that, when he would speak to the white man in the presence of "a group of young negroes," he would "lump" black and white "all together as 'you boys'" (112).

Only one member of the Ku Klux Klan has any individual existence in "By the People" or The Mansion: a "veteran ranking Klansman" who seems to accept defeat at the hands of the "schoolteachers and editors and Sunday School superintendents" who elected Clarence Snopes as their champion (131, 333).

These unarmed loggers who join the hunt for Old Ben in Go Down, Moses travel thirteen miles to get to Major de Spain’s camp.

In addition to Roth Edmonds, Oscar, Dan, Lucas Beauchamp, George and Nat Wilkins, the search party that goes looking for Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses includes at least two additional characters, simply referred to first as "some others" and then as "another man" (120). The race of these people is not indicated, which in Faulkner's fiction usually means someone is white. Elsewhere in the novel, however, it is clear that the only white man who lives on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is Roth, which explains why we identify these 'other men' as 'Negro.'

In Go Down, Moses various combinations of the "gaunt, malaria-ridden" men who live in the wildest parts of the big woods (210) appear in throughout the year to look at the dog named Lion while Sam is training him. Many of them feel invested in the hunt for Old Ben, since the bear often raided their crops and attacked their livestock.

In Go Down, Moses the servant who drives Major de Spain's coach is the man who lends Boon the gun he used to shoot at another Negro.

In its account of the position Sam Fathers occupies on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation, Go Down, Moses mentions the tenant farmers who "farmed allotted acres" but also acknowledges the existence of the men who do "field-work for daily wages" (161). However, although wage labor was replacing tenantry in parts of the South, no such salaried field-workers appear in the novel.

Ike's account of U.S. history in Go Down, Moses divides the North during the Civil War era into the capitalist class and the workers. That second group is who is represented by this entry: "the New England mechanics who didn't even own land," the factory workers who lived in "rented tenements," and so on (273).

This couple appears in "Pantaloon in Black" as a story and again as a chapter in Go Down, Moses only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt.

The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis in Go Down, Moses are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men outside the South who, according to him, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery.

Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222).

The Beauchamp property in Go Down, Moses is a large cotton plantation, with an unspecified but clearly large number of slaves who work either in the house or in the fields. "Four or five" of these slaves appear in "Was" when they bring horses for the hunt for Tomey's Turl. During the Civil War most of them leave; according to the narrator, the "ones that didn't go" are the ones that their master, Hubert Beauchamp, "could not have wanted" (287).

Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to him, brought about the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273).

Among the people who come out to the hunting camp to watch the final hunt for the bear in Go Down, Moses are several men from beyond Yoknapatawpha, "townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson" (212). They come because they have heard of Lion and Old Ben, but are not hunters: "Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday" (212).

In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.)

In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner.

A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673).

General Wheeler fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Three decades later he fought for the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Bayard Sartoris in "My Grandmother Millard" says that "Father would have called [him an] apostate" for fighting under the American flag, and the story quotes another Confederate general, Jubal Early, as saying Wheeler will go to hell for that betrayal of the Lost Cause (673).

The "chaplain" who marries Philip and Melisandre in "My Grandmother Millard" is an officer serving in Forrest's troop (699).

In "My Grandmother Millard," four officers "in their gray and braid and sabres" accompany Philip and the chaplain to the wedding at Sartoris (699). This group probably includes some of the five officers who came to Sartoris earlier with Forrest, but that is not directly said or suggested in the text.

In "My Grandmother Millard" Forrest tells Granny that he has placed Philip "in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet" (694) - this is that guard.

According to Ab Snopes in "My Grandmother Millard," "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't copy the strategy that Mrs. Compson used to try to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676).

Describing his family history in "My Grandmother Millard," Philip Backhouse refers to the group that prevented his uncle from being elected Governor of Tennessee as "a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists" (682). Although Tennessee did secede from the Union and join the Confederacy (the last state to do so), it was deeply divided between secessionists and Unionists.

At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115).

In "Shall Not Perish" Major de Spain refers to his son's "forefathers [who] fought and died for [their country] then, even though what they fought and lost for was a dream" (108). "Then" is "eighty years ago," and as the word "lost" suggests, the country he is talking about was the Confederacy; these forefathers fought against the United States. (One of them would have been this Major's father, who was a Major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.) De Spain's unreconstructed attitude explains why he covers his son's coffin with "the Confederate flag" (107).

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish."

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111), the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses, as a reference point for the age of his father's Grandfather.

The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians.

Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plots that include much drinking, sex, and humor. According to "Appendix Compson," the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" in Faulkner's Jefferson hide the copies of Smith's books that they borrow from and return to the library "carefully wrapped" inside newspapers (333).

In "Appendix Compson," Melissa Meek is the "county librarian, a mouse-sized and -colored woman who had never married," and also a former classmate of Caddy Compson who sees a photo of her in occupied France (333). Attempting to "save" Caddy enables Meek to transcend the characterization of her name, her profession, and her lifelong habits (335). Sporting "two feverish spots of determination in her ordinarily colorless cheeks" (333), she enters the feedstore where Jason IV works and where "only men ever entered," and she speaks to him, despite having refused to do so for many years.

When Melissa Meek gets there in "Appendix Compson," the bus station in Memphis is filled with "a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions" (337).

As noted in "Appendix Compson," "Ikkemotubbe's descendants and people" - the tribe of Chickasaw Indians that originally lived in Yoknapatawpha - are "gone" after being 'removed' by the U.S. government (328), but the descendants of the Indians who married Negroes remain, though the "wild blood" on their Indian ancestry appears "only occasionally in the noseshape of a Negro on a cottonwagon" (329).

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, and raise him there after her death.

The "handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral" who is seen in a photograph in "Appendix Compson" is presumably Caddy's lover during World War II (334). He and that relationship are further characterized by the photo's luxurious background: "a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car," all of which are featured in "a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight" (334).