Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
1219 | Unnamed Negro Old Woman 2 |
This is the "old negro woman" in Light in August who sits, "smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth," whom Joe Brown calls "Aunty" when he asks her to help him get a message to the sheriff (433-34). At first she refuses, saying that the one black man she knew who "thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him . . . aint never come back" (434). |
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651 | Unnamed Negro Old Woman 3 |
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this is the "one old woman" among the huge group of self-emancipated slaves crowding toward the river and the Union army; she tries to get a ride on Rosa Millard's wagon so that she can "see the water before she died" (48, 103). |
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1997 | Unnamed Negro outside Jail |
This is the "someone" in "The Hound" to whom one of the Negroes in jail is yelling through the window (163). It could just as easily be a woman as a man, but while the race is not specified, other Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which friends and family of black prisoners often gather outside the same window - not to mention the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, which makes it unlikely that a Negro in jail would be yelling at a white person - explain why we assume this "someone" is also black. |
|
1582 | Unnamed Negro Parson |
This is the imposing-looking Pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who leads the delegation that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris, requesting him to pay back to the church the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund. The narrator describes him as "a huge, neckless negro in a Prince Albert coat . . . with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye" (282). |
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1221 | Unnamed Negro Passerby |
In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke. |
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1583 | Unnamed Negro Paving Crew 1 |
Perhaps as another symptom of the "newness" of the town Horace and Belle move to in Flags in the Dust after her divorce, on his way back from the railroad station he notes that the street is "uptorn . . . in the throes of being paved" (376). The "lines of negroes" doing the work "swing their tools in a languid rhythm," singing "snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations" (376). Since they explicitly work in "lines," this may be a chain gang, and the men may be convict laborers, but that is not said explicitly. |
|
432 | Unnamed Negro Paving Crew 2 |
In "A Rose for Emily," this crew of Negro men come from out of town to pave the town's sidewalks; the "singing" they do "in time to the rise and fall of the picks" [pick-axes] they swing is a source of entertainment to the town boys (124). |
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2148 | Unnamed Negro Planing Mill Workers |
Light in August never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this Character to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black. |
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630 | Unnamed Negro Porter 1 |
According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel. |
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1196 | Unnamed Negro Porter 2 |
In The Hamlet this man takes care of cleaning and keeping fires lit at the Savoy Hotel, where Mink's wife works while Mink is awaiting trial (288). |
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1198 | Unnamed Negro Porter 3 |
In Intruder in the Dust the narrator calls the man who opens up the door of the barbershop at six o'clock every morning and "sweeps out the hair and cigarette stubs" a "porter" (30). The brief passage about him suggests he may also work in the pool hall nearby. |
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1199 | Unnamed Negro Porter 4 |
This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191). |
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1197 | Unnamed Negro Porter 5 |
While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37). |
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1719 | Unnamed Negro Preacher 1 |
In The Sound and the Fury this man is the regular preacher at the Negro church in Jefferson. Though he does not give the Easter sermon, he enters the church with Reverend Shegog and is described in sharp contrast to the "undersized" visiting clergyman: he is "huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat. His head is magisterial and profound, his neck rolled above his collar in rich folds" (293). |
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3184 | Unnamed Negro Preacher 2 |
Tubbs, the jailor, tells Nancy that he has "found that preacher" she requested (221). He never appears in Requiem for a Nun, but it's safe to assume that he will be with her when she is executed - after sundown on the day that the play within the novel ends. |
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3540 | Unnamed Negro Principal |
The principal of Jefferson's Negro school in The Mansion is a "college-bred man" and, according to Gavin Stevens, a person "of intelligence and devotion too" (247). In his role as narrator of Chapter 9, Charles Mallison seconds Gavin's words, describing the principal as an "intelligent dedicated man with [a] composed and tragic face" (248). Along with the school's "senior woman teacher," he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247). |
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1877 | Unnamed Negro Prostitutes |
The prostitutes who work at the less expensive Memphis brothel to which Clarence takes Virgil and Fonzo in Sanctuary are described as "coffee-colored" (199). Their dresses are "bright," their hair is "ornate" and their smiles are "golden" (199). |
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3359 | Unnamed Negro Pullman Porters |
Although they are unseen in The Town, Charles knows there are "pullman porters" on the train that arrives in Jefferson in Chapter 24 (377). Shortly after the Civil War a white man named George Pullman designed the original sleeper cars for passenger trains, and hired blacks, in many cases former slaves, to serve as the attendants in those cars. |
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3541 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Fireman |
Mink sees the fireman "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" beside the engineer as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station in The Mansion (39). In this context, the 'fireman' is a man who keeps train's boiler hot by shoveling coal into its firebox. The text itself provides no further information him, but given the historical patterns of the segregated South and the 'firemen' who appear elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, it seems safe to assume the man Mink sees is a Negro. |
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3358 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Porters |
In The Town, these two men carry the medallion of Eula across the railroad platform to Gavin's car. |
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3542 | Unnamed Negro Railroad Porters and Waiters |
Mink Snopes remembers these men near the end of The Mansion, when he recalls the "New Orleans-bound passenger train" that he had seen "thirty-eight or forty-years ago" at the station in Jefferson and the "uppity impudent" Negro porters and Negro waiters he could see through the windows of the cars (445). Using a term that seems reserved for blacks in the Jim Crow South, Mink thinks of them as "uppity" on principle - presumably because they are on the train and he is not. |
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3179 | Unnamed Negro Residents of Jefferson |
There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190). |
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1286 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Fireman |
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. |
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1185 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Worker |
In The Town this man works with Eck Snopes at a logging mill. Gavin Stevens calls him "one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecilic" in describing his and Eck's disastrous attempt to set "a tremendous cypress log . . . onto the saw-carriage" (33). |
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1290 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Workers 1 |
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. |
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2676 | Unnamed Negro Sawmill Workers 2 |
Apparently except for Fentry, the workers at Quick's sawmill in Frenchman's Bend are all black. At least, when Isham Quick describes Fentry's arrival at the mill in "Tomorrow," he says he did "the same work" and drew "the same pay as the niggers done" (103). (In the larger Yoknapatawpha context, this is an exception to the usual absence of Negroes, except for a few domestic servants, in the Frenchman's Bend area.) |
|
3543 | Unnamed Negro Schoolchildren |
After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). Like their teachers, these children are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). |
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1584 | Unnamed Negro Section Hand |
In Flags in the Dust, this railroad worker - referred to by Simon simply as a "section hand" (7) - is apparently the only witness to Young Bayard's 1919 return to Jefferson from World War I. It seems that he told Simon about it, and Simon in turn tells Old Bayard. |
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3231 | Unnamed Negro Sergeant |
In "By the People" this Sergeant is serving in the Korean War when "single-handedly" he and Devries hold off an enemy attack to allow the escape of a trapped battalion (134). He is wounded during the action. This Sergeant appears again when The Mansion describes the same event, with one difference - in the novel the man's heroics occur during World War II (339). |
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1202 | Unnamed Negro Servant 1 |
Described in Flags in the Dust as "a thin woman in a funereal purple turban" who eats with gestures of "elegant gentility" while visiting with Sis' Rachel in the kitchen, she is presumably the maid of one of the white ladies attending Belle Mitchell's afternoon social (26). |
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1201 | Unnamed Negro Servant 2 |
In Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157). |
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1893 | Unnamed Negro Servant in Pensacola |
In Sanctuary this servant works for the unnamed wealthy woman who befriends Popeye's mother. She is not specifically referred to as a Negro, but since nearly all the domestic servants in the fictions are black, we have chosen to identify her that way. |
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1693 | Unnamed Negro Servant of Bland |
In The Sound and the Fury this man seems more a product of Mrs. Bland's imagination than a real person. One of the stories she tells about her son Gerald focuses on the loyalty of "his nigger," who pleads to be allowed to accompany his "marster" to Harvard (107). |
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633 | Unnamed Negro Servants 1 |
In "Smoke" the servants of Old Anse Holland witness much of the tension between their master and his sons. On the night Young Anse leaves home for good, the scene was “of such violence that the Negro servants all fled the house and scattered for the night” (5). |
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1203 | Unnamed Negro Servants 2 |
In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow. |
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1205 | Unnamed Negro Servants 3 |
These are the "few Negro servants" in "Knight's Gambit" who worked for Mrs. Harriss' father in the past; they were the her only "companions" growing up (150). |
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1206 | Unnamed Negro Servants 4 |
These are the "other Negroes" mentioned by Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" - other than the "grooms" who tend to the horses and dogs - on the Harriss plantation (234). Presumably these are the servants inside the big house that Mr. Harriss built, but no other details about them are provided. |
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3396 | Unnamed Negro Servants of Doctor Peabody |
In Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody's household of black servants includes, to quote his dehumanizing description of them, "six or seven registered ones" as well as "a new yearlin' every day or so" (303). Like Abe, the only servant who is named, their main task seems to be assisting the gentlemen and ladies who come to fish at the doctor's pond. |
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2617 | Unnamed Negro Shooting Victim |
At a "bleak" train station he is passing through in The Hamlet, Labove witnesses a white man shooting this "negro" (138). Although the Negro seems to be dying, and tells the "white folks" trying to help him that "I awready been shot," when his clothes are pushed aside the bullet that hit him "rolls out . . . bloodless" (139). |
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1585 | Unnamed Negro Soldiers |
These are the other black soldiers whom Caspey Strother mentions in Flags in the Dust in the stories he brings home from World War I. He never mentions any of their names, usually referring to them as "boys," but he does refer specifically to two: "de Captain's dog-robber" and "a school boy" (59). (It's unclear what Caspey means by "dog-robber," but he may be mangling the term 'dogsbody' - a British term for a person who does minor tasks; as an officer, the "Captain" in the phrase would be likely to have someone in such a menial role. |
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1354 | Unnamed Negro Son of Vicksburg Aunt |
Just before the young woman enters the tent at the end of "Delta Autumn," Ike McCaslin sees, "sitting in the stern" of the boat that brought her to the camp, "a Negro man" (277). The boat is his, and he is the woman's "cousin," though unlike his, her race is not immediately apparent (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for Go Down, Moses, he made the young woman the granddaughter of James Beauchamp, and so made this cousin part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family. For that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database. |
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3747 | Unnamed Negro Stableman |
When Lucius and Lycurgus enter Linscomb's stable in The Reivers they see "a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear" (220). |
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1904 | Unnamed Negro Station Porter |
The "negro with a broom" in Sanctuary whom Gowan encounters when he wakes up in the Oxford train station is astonished at the young white man's disheveled appearance (35). |
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2435 | Unnamed Negro Steamboat Hands |
This is one of the two groups of men in Absalom! from whom Charles E. C-V. Bon - a "white-colored man" (167) with a "coal black" wife (166) - deliberately provokes a racial reaction: "the negro stevedores and deckhands on steamboats . . . who thought he was a white man" (167). |
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3545 | Unnamed Negro Stevedores |
The river in Memphis that Mink remembers in The Mansion was lined with "chanting stevedores" loading the riverboats (315). |
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3546 | Unnamed Negro Store Manager|Owner |
While he's in Memphis in The Mansion, Mink goes into a "dingy store" where he sees a "Negro man" who seems to be "running it" and "maybe he even owned it": after all his time in prison Mink wonders if "the new laws" mean a black man "could even own a store" (319). |
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2544 | Unnamed Negro Strangers |
In The Hamlet these "strange negroes" are defined by their absence. According to the narrator, Negroes who are not already known in Frenchman's Bend stay out of the area, where the white population is known to be violent and hostile to them (5). |
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2962 | Unnamed Negro Street Crews |
Like the other black inhabitants of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, the "street department crews" are no where to be seen on the Monday after Lucas is arrested, though this doesn't prevent the narrator of Intruder in the Dust from describing their usual employment: "flushing the pavement with hoses and sweeping up the discarded Sunday papers and empty cigarette packs" (119). One irony of Intruder is that the absence of the black population results in the narrative describing them in more detail than any other Yoknapatawpha fiction provides. |
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3547 | Unnamed Negro Student |
The first time that Linda goes into "the Negro grammar and high school" in The Mansion (246), this "alarmed messenger" is sent to tell the principal (247). |
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3360 | Unnamed Negro Substitute Fireman |
In The Town Tom Tom Bird's "substitute, who fires the boilers on Sunday" (26), also fills in for him when Tom Tom keeps lookout at home. |
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3548 | Unnamed Negro Sunday School Students |
After Linda surrenders her attempt to improve Jefferson's black schools in The Mansion, she meets with "a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches" (254). |
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3549 | Unnamed Negro Teacher |
In The Mansion this "senior woman teacher" in Jefferson's Negro school seconds the principal as he tries to explain to Linda Snopes Kohl why her plan to improve education for blacks is misguided (247). |
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3550 | Unnamed Negro Teachers |
After returning from Spain in The Mansion, Linda Snopes Kohl begins going into "the Negro grammar and high school" to try to improve conditions for "the pupils" (246). The black teachers in the school (along with their students) are described as "startled" and "perhaps alarmed" by her presence (246). Linda's plan would "send" these same black teachers "North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are" - meanwhile replacing them in the school in Jefferson with white teachers (250). |
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3748 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmer 1 |
This "tenant on a farm six miles from town" in The Reivers is either the father or the husband of the woman Ludus is romancing (10). |
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1076 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 1 |
As the narrator of Flags in the Dust says, "the Sartoris place was farmed on shares" (289). The black tenant farmers are not slaves, though Simon thinks of them as "field niggers," a label left over from slavery (241). In the narrative these share croppers are more like part of the landscape than characters, but they are mentioned several times - first when they "raise their hands" to "salute" Bayard as he drives home from the bank at the beginning of the novel (8). |
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2564 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 2 |
In Ratliff's account of the barn burning at De Spain's in The Hamlet, he refers to these men who are fighting the fire as "his [i.e. De Spain's] niggers" (19). That could mean they are servants, though it seems more likely that, like Ab Snopes, they are tenant farmers working other pieces of land at De Spain's. |
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684 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 3 |
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses Gavin Stevens notes that "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260, 357). Although he doesn't say so explicitly, the rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Stevens is sure "they wouldn't" tell Mollie about her grandson's fate, even if they ever "hear about it" (260, 357). |
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2780 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 4 |
In it clearly implied in Go Down, Moses that the labor on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is supplied by Negro tenant farmers. They don't appear in the novel, but when Lucas sees the sun coming up he thinks that in "another hour . . . every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it" (40). Like the fields, these mules belong to Roth Edmonds. |
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635 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 5 |
The Negroes who work the land at the Harriss plantation are variously referred to in "Knight's Gambit" as "croppers" and "tenants" (163). As the owners of the land, both Mrs. Harriss' father and her husband use the tenant system, which became widespread across the South in the aftermath of Emancipation. The narrative notes that Mrs. Harriss' father managed the system in such a way that "a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared" to drive the white family's carriage - an "old battered Victoria" - whenever his daughter wanted to go to Jefferson (155). Mr. |
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3763 | Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 6 |
The noise of the car arriving at the Edmonds place in The Reivers brings "Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place" to see it (61). This entry assumes that "everybody else" is black, and belongs to one of the families of tenant farmers who work an allotted piece of the Edmonds property. We assume that because Lucius adds that the group does not include "the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from his horse" (61). Here "the ones" clearly refers to the people whom the white land owner Zack expects to see working in the fields instead of taking time off to stare at a car. |
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2618 | Unnamed Negro Tenants and Servants |
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). |
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1369 | Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 1 |
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.) |
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3788 | Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 2 |
These people don't appear in The Reivers, but their presence is evoked when the narrator sees Reba and Minnie at the Parsham depot getting out of "the Jimcrow half" of the smoking car - "where Negroes traveled" (194). |
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3361 | Unnamed Negro Train Porter 1 |
Although he's usually the first employee off the train when it arrives in Jefferson, in The Town this porter on the train carrying Byron's children lets the conductor and the flagman exit the train first (377). |
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3362 | Unnamed Negro Train Porter 2 |
In The Town the porter accompanies the conductor as he signals for Byron Snopes's four children to board the train. (He could be the same man as the porter on the train that brought the children to Jefferson a few days earlier, but that is not made explicit.) |
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1586 | Unnamed Negro Trainhand |
This is one of "two negroes" in Flags in the Dust - the other is Sol - who help Horace unload his baggage from the train on which he returns to Jefferson (157). |
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3551 | Unnamed Negro Trainman |
In The Mansion Mink watches this Negro, who strikes him as "uppity," got off the train and put down a footstool so passengers can disembark (38). |
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3232 | Unnamed Negro Troops |
These are the two different groups of "Negro troops" who serve in the U.S. Army in World War II and Korea that Devries commands in "By the People" (134). When Faulkner has the story's narrator say that in Korea, Devries "commands troops containing Negroes" rather than "Negro troops," as in the earlier war (134), he may be acknowledging the actual, slow history of racial integration in the military. World War II was the first time the U.S. Army allowed blacks to serve in combat, but kept them in segregated units that were commanded, as the narrator notes, by white officers. |
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1303 | Unnamed Negro Undertaker |
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the Jefferson undertaker who buries the black citizens of Yoknapatawpha is himself a Negro. It was typical practice throughout the Jim Crow South at the time of the story to segregate funeral parlors as well as cemeteries. The "Negro undertaker" himself does not appear in either text (265, 363). |
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1279 | Unnamed Negro Voters 1 |
Faulkner relates the time Colonel John Sartoris prevented a group of newly emancipated Negroes from voting in three different texts. In the first, Flags in the Dust, the event is described by Will Falls, who witnessed it "that day in '72" - i.e. 1872 (242). The second time, in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and The Unvanquished, the event is recounted by the Colonel's son Bayard, who witnessed it as an adolescent. |
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3645 | Unnamed Negro Voters 2 |
According to Requiem for a Nun, "even Negroes" can vote in Yoknapatawpha elections "now" - though these enfranchised voters "vote for the same . . . white supremacy champions that the white" voters elected (38). |
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1210 | Unnamed Negro Wagon Driver 1 |
This is the "negro in a passing wagon" who gives Young John Sartoris a lift back toward town after John crashes the hot air balloon in Flags in the Dust (68). |
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1208 | Unnamed Negro Wagon Driver 2 |
In Light in August Joe Christmas hails this man as he passes by on a quiet country road to ask "what day of the week" it is (337). |
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1209 | Unnamed Negro Wagon Driver 3 |
In Light in August this young man offers Joe a ride to Mottstown. He is from "two counties back yonder," and so presumably not aware of either Joanna's murder or the manhunt for Christmas (339). |
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636 | Unnamed Negro Wagon Driver 4 |
In "Raid" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this former slave is among the group allocated to Rosa Millard by the Union Lieutenant. He is identified only as a stranger to her, Bayard and Ringo. He steps forward to drive the wagon when the Lieutenant asks for someone who can handle "two span" of mules (53, 111). |
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1370 | Unnamed Negro Waiter 1 |
In Flags in the Dust "a negro lad" serves a car that pulls up to the curb outside the drugstore (274). Presumably he fetches something from the soda fountain inside the store, but that is not specified. |
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970 | Unnamed Negro Waiter 2 |
The young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to the Negro who brings food to the McKellogg apartment on "a kind of wheelbarrer" as "a nigger . . . in a short kind of shirttail coat" (98). |
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971 | Unnamed Negro Waiter 3 |
In Go Down, Moses this waiter works in the Memphis restaurant where Ike and Boon stop before returning to the hunting camp. |
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1371 | Unnamed Negro Waiter 4 |
The "Negro waiter" in The Reivers who waits on the few guests at the Parsham hotel is described as "temporary" (190, 193). |
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1878 | Unnamed Negro Waitress |
All Sanctuary says about this waitress is that Minnie's husband "went off" with her sometime before the novel begins (210). |
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2150 | Unnamed Negro Who Disappeared |
This character in Light in August is enigmatic. He is mentioned by the "old negro woman" whom Joe Brown asks to take a message to the Sheriff for him (433-34). She refuses, citing the case of this man as her reason: "I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither" (434). |
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1996 | Unnamed Negro Who Finds Gun |
In "The Hound" the clerk named Snopes tells Cotton that the man who found his shotgun in the slough where he tried to hide it was "a nigger squirl hunter" (159). When Faulkner re-tells this story in The Hamlet, Cotton is named Mink Snopes, the clerk is named Lump Snopes, and the Negro who "found that durn gun" is fishing instead of hunting - actually, he is "grabbling," in which you try to catch the fish under water with your bare hands (257). |
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3180 | Unnamed Negro Who Kicks Nancy |
All we know about referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "the man who kicked" Nancy and caused her miscarriage is that he might have been the unborn child's father (219). Because the assault happened at "a picnic or dance or frolic or fight" and Nancy would not have been allowed to attend a gathering of whites, we are assuming this man is black (219). |
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716 | Unnamed Negro Wife |
This character is created in "That Evening Sun" by Mr. Compson, either because of his assumptions about someone like Jesus, or because he desires to reassure Nancy that Jesus won't return; she is the new wife that Jesus has married in St Louis (295). |
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3536 | Unnamed Negro Wife of Cotton Farmer |
The wife of the cotton farmer in The Mansion works with him and the whole family picking cotton, and then, with her daughter, she prepares supper according to the etiquette of Jim Crow - that is, first she serves the meal for Mink Snopes to eat alone, and then "the meal for the family" (440). |
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2080 | Unnamed Negro Witness 1 |
This man in "Smoke" - referred to only as "a Negro" - tells the authorities about seeing Old Anse "digging up the graves in the cedar grove where five generations of his wife’s people rested" (9). |
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2081 | Unnamed Negro Witness 2 |
In "Smoke" this man - referred to by Gavin Stevens only as "a nigger" - reports to Stevens that a "big car was parked in Virginius Holland’s barn the night before Judge Dukinfield was killed" (29). |
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3552 | Unnamed Negro Witness 3 |
In The Mansion this unnamed Negro reports to Ratliff about seeing Mink Snopes making his way back to town. |
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1211 | Unnamed Negro Woman 1 |
In Flags in the Dust the wife of the black farmer in whose barn Bayard spends his last night in Yoknapatawpha feeds him breakfast and dinner on Christmas Day, but she herself is not named or described. |
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637 | Unnamed Negro Woman 2 |
This woman is part of a "throng of Negroes before a cheap grocery store" in "Mule in the Yard"; Old Het gives her a banana, but it's not clear whether it's to eat or just to hold for a minute (259). She also appears in The Town. |
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1212 | Unnamed Negro Woman 3 |
This is "the other woman" with whom Minnie's husband Ludus is having an affair in The Mansion (89). |
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1213 | Unnamed Negro Woman 4 |
Much to Mink's surprise in The Mansion, this "big Negro woman" (305) is a congregant of Goodyhay's church. Albert explains to Mink that "her son had it too just like she was a white woman" - "it" is never clearly explained, but probably means that this son was killed during World War II (305). |
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1183 | Unnamed Negro Woman Boon Shoots |
This "Negro girl" in The Reivers is shot by Boon on Courthouse Square when he is trying to shoot Ludus (14). Her wound seems serious - not only is she "screaming" but also "bleeding like a stuck pig" - but the Sheriff decides Boon's white friends can resolve the situation by giving her father five dollars and her "a new dress . . . and a bag of candy" (14-15). When he mentions the new dress, Lucius as narrator notes that "there wasn't anything under" the dress she was wearing when she was shot (15). |
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2151 | Unnamed Negro Woman in Labor |
She and her husband live in a cabin "immediately behind" Hightower's house in Light in August (73). Her husband leaves her to get help in the middle of her labor; when Hightower arrives in response, he finds her "on her hands and knees on the floor, trying to get back into bed, screaming and wailing" (74). With Hightower's help she delivers the baby, but it is "already dead" - "doubtless injured when she left the bed" (74). |
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2162 | Unnamed Negro Woman in the North |
In Light in August Joe Christmas and this woman lives "as man and wife" in Chicago or Detroit (225). According to the narrator, , she resembles "an ebony carving," and as Joe lies in bed with her he "tries to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes" (225-26). Since she is the only Negro woman whom the narrative mentions Joe living with, it seems likely that she is the woman Joe is remembering when he thinks about the possibility that Joanna might reject him: "No white woman ever did that. |
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1926 | Unnamed Negro Woman in Window |
In Sanctuary, as Popeye and Temple drive along the street with Miss Reba's on it, they see on the "second storey gallery" of one of the "dingy" houses "a young negress in her underclothes" (142). Her undress and the location of the building suggest she is a prostitute, but that is not made definite. |
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2152 | Unnamed Negro Woman Near Burden Place |
This woman is mentioned by Byron in Light in August, who tells Hightower that there is "a nigger woman, old enough to be sensible, that dont live over two hundred yards away" from the cabin on the Burden place where he has moved Lena (314). He says she can help Lena when she goes into labor. |
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2216 | Unnamed Negro Woman on Mourner's Bench |
When Christmas disrupts the revival meeting in the black church in Light in August, this woman, "already in a semihysterical state" from the service, calls him "the devil!" and "Satan himself!" before running straight at him (322). He knocks her down. (A regular feature at revival meetings, the 'mourner's bench' is set in front of the pulpit for repentant sinners to occupy.) |
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2153 | Unnamed Negro Woman Wearing Christmas' Shoes |
This is the woman in Light in August who trades "a pair of her husband's brogans" to Joe Christmas in return for his shoes (329). She is 'captured' anticlimactically when the Sheriff's dogs follow the scent of the shoes to the cabin next to a corn field where she and her family live; when the armed posse kicks open the door she drops the iron skillet she was holding. |
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450 | Unnamed Negro Women |
The "Negro women" in "A Rose for Emily" appear only in a negative phrase identifying Colonel Sartoris as the Jefferson mayor who "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (119-20). We hear nothing else about these women or this edict, whether they complied or it was enforced or when it might have been rescinded. The "apron" would have typified, not to say stereo-typified, all black women as domestic servants. |