Character Keys

When Temple thinks about her father "sitting on the porch at home" in Sanctuary, she imagines that he is "watching a negro mow the lawn" (51).

These are the two unnamed black men in Flags in the Dust whom Bayard, trying to avoid a white child, swerves toward on his wild stallion ride through Jefferson. Since one is "playing a hose on the sidewalk" and the other is holding "a pitchfork," it seems safe to identify them as yardmen working for one of the white families who live on this "quiet" street (130). They are not injured, though Bayard is when the horse slips on the wet concrete; the "negro with the pitchfork" drives the stallion away from Bayard's fallen body (131).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, Lucas Beauchamp compares George Wilkins favorably as a son-in-law to "the other buck niggers" in his neighborhood (213; in the novel this phrase is revised to "nigger bucks," 34). By these offensive terms Lucas refers to other eligible young black males who live nearby. The racist stereotype that, for good reason, we now hear in those terms would not have been felt or meant by Lucas.

Another servant of Major de Spain in "Barn Burning," described only as "the Negro youth on a fat bay carriage horse" (12); he rides behind De Spain, carrying the rug that Ab Snopes has soiled.

While walking along a Jefferson street in Light in August, this "negro youth" is so frightened by the "still and baleful" look on Christmas' face as he stares through the barbershop window at Brown that he carefully "edges away" from him (113).

Neither "Delta Autumn" nor the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses makes clear how many people from Yoknapatawpha are in the hunting party, but at least several of them are black, and are there not to hunt but to serve the white hunters. The text names one, Isham, and singles out another as "the youngest Negro" (274, 335) - they have their own character entries. There is at least one more, because both narratives say that "two of the Negroes" cut firewood for cooking and warmth (272, 327).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris mentions these people in his letter to Jenny, asking her to "tell [them] hello" (529).

In "Death Drag," "a Negro or two" are among the first people to reach the airplane after it lands at the town airport (186).

This group represents the unnamed Negroes in "A Bear Hunt" who are not included in some other group: the blacks at the picnic who were not physically abused by the Provine gang, and the people whom the narrator refers to as "Negroes among us living in economic competition" with the white society; this latter group is identified as having "our family names" - i.e. the same last names as people in the white community (66).

In Absalom! these "negroes" who live in Jefferson report Charles E. S-V. Bon when he gets "either blind or violently drunk in the negro store district" in town; they "seem to fear either him or Clytie or Judith" (170).

These are the "negroes" at the "ball" in Absalom! where Charles E. S-V. Bon starts a fight (164). Before the fight they are described as "dancing" and having a "dice game in the kitchen"; in the fight they are described as "a moiling clump of negro backs and heads and black arms and hands clutching sticks of stove wood and cooking implements and razors" (164).

In Light in August these members of "remote negro churches" "about the county" listen to Doc Hines when he interrupts their services to commandeer the pulpit and preach to them about "the superiority of the white race" (343). The narrator says that they "believed that he was crazy, touched by God," or "perhaps" even "God himself," "since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable" (344).

In both the short story and the novel titled "The Unvanquished," these Negroes are among the people in attendance at the secular service in the Episcopal Church when Rosa distributes money and mules to the needy people of Yoknapatawpha. In his narrative, Bayard indicates that at the beginning of the Civil War they were enslaved, but now, presumably because their former masters are gone because of the War, Bayard calls them "the dozen niggers that had got free by accident and didn't know what to do about it" (84).

Although in other Yoknapatawpha fictions the population of Frenchman's Bend is almost entirely white, local Negroes appear in "By the People" and again in The Mansion in two ways. The "roistering gang" that Clarence Snopes leads frequently "beats Negroes" (89, 328). When Clarence becomes the Bend's constable, he also hits the "first few Negroes who ran afoul of his new official capacity . . . with the blackjack he carried or the butt of the pistol which he now officially wore" (89, 329).

Jefferson's African-American population appears in The Mansion indirectly, in several narrative references to them as a group and from several different political perspectives. On his trip into Jefferson at the beginning of the novel, for example, Mink walks through a "section [of] all Negro homes" (38) between the Square and the railroad depot; his thoughts seem to include the actual 'Negroes' who live in these homes, though no people come clearly into focus.

In The Sound and the Fury these "two negro lads" tell Jason they can drive a car, but are not willing to take him to Jefferson for two dollars (312).

Part of the time Christmas is on "the street which was to run for fifteen years" in Light in August he spends in Chicago and Detroit, living and eating "with negroes" (225) as a Negro himself. He fights with any of the black men "who call him white" (225).

The "clientele" of the "little crossroads store" that Thomas Sutpen opens after the Civil War includes, according to Shreve McCannon, "freed niggers" who live in the area (147). Shreve uses the adjective "freed" because the historical context is the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and Emancipation. He uses that derogatory noun to describe these former slaves because Negroes are considered inferior - though it's interesting to note that in this same passage Shreve reveals how, as a Canadian, he is with the equally derogatory term "white trash" (147).

Outside the county jail in Sanctuary these Negroes gather in the evenings and sing with the man inside awaiting execution. They wear "natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls" (114), and have "work-thickened shoulders" (124).

After Matt Levitt's departure in The Town, Linda begins to go to and from school "with another girl who lived on the same street" (222).

This is the neighbor of Popeye's mother in Sanctuary who reports him for "cutting up a half-grown kitten" (309). It may be the neighbor who reported the fire in the boarding house earlier, but the text gives no indication of that.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," Mrs. Gant "borrows a pistol from another neighbor" when she leaves the Bend to get revenge on her husband (369). We know this 'other' neighbor is not the woman with whom she leaves Zilphia, but that is all the text makes explicit; that this neighbor's is male is our assumption.

In Sanctuary Horace Benbow tells Ruby Lamar that she can "always get me by telephone, at ------," and gives her "the name of a neighbor" that the narrative withholds from us (201). This is that neighbor. (In Flags in the Dust the Benbows' neighbors are named Wyatt; there's no obvious reason for Faulkner's coyness about the neighbor in this novel.)

In "A Rose for Emily," this unnamed woman, a neighbor of Emily Grierson, calls on the mayor to complain about the smell emanating from Emily's house.

In Light in August this "neighbor" pays Christmas two dollars for chopping wood (197).

This man is a "neighbor" of Mrs. Harriss in "Knight's Gambit"; because he passes her property "on his way home," he can provide the people in Jefferson with information about Gualdres' odd behavior at nights (178).

This is the man who lives "four miles away" from Sutpen's in Absalom! and who captures Bon's horse two days after Bon's funeral (123).

When Vernon Tull arrives at the Bundren house the day after Addie’s death in As I Lay Dying, he finds "about a dozen wagons was already there" (85). These belong to the group of neighbors who attend Addie’s funeral. Before the service they divide themselves into female and male groups: the "womenfolks" wait inside the house while "the men stop on the porch, talking some, not looking at one another" or "sit and squat" a "little piece from the house" (87). When "the women begin to sing," the men move into the house (91).

Houston's neighbors in The Mansion "didn't dare knock on his door anymore" after his wife died (8).

In "Dry September" over time Minnie Cooper's only social contacts become the women who live in her neighborhood - identified as both "neighbors" and "friends" in the text (175, 180). She occasionally goes to movie with them. While the lynching is going on outside town, a group of them take her to another movie, walking through the streets with her, reassuring her with "voices" that sound "like long, hovering sighs of hissing exultation" that "'there's not a Negro on the Square'" (181).

"An Error in Chemistry" refers to the neighbors of Wesley Pritchel as the "people in the adjacent countryside" (119). It is safe to assume that they are all, like Pritchel himself, farming families. They play several different roles in the story. They gossip about Wesley's relationship with his "son-in-law" (114). Until Pritchel drives them off, they take clay from his clay-pit to make "serviceable though crude pottery" (119). The "man and his wife" who are Pritchel's "nearest neighbors" are summoned to his house by the sheriff to stay with the old man after Ellie's murder (118).

This "New Englander" is different from the 'Yankees' and 'Northerners' that Gavin Stevens often disparages in Intruder in the Dust. During his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7, Gavin mentions "the New Englander" after telling his nephew that the white South, "alone in the United States," is "a homogeneous people"; he adds that this "New Englander" who lives "back inland" from the cities on the coast is also homogeneous, "but there are no longer enough of him" to preserve what, in Gavin's mind, the white South must defend (150).

After rebuilding his house in "Knight's Gambit," Mr. Harriss "begins to bring friends up from New Orleans" (162); "strange outlanders" (163); "men and the women with a hard, sleek, expensive unmarried air and look about them even when now and then some of them really were married to each other perhaps" (163).

In The Mansion this unnamed "newspaper man" and his partner - "a young couple about the same age as them" (191) - are going to occupy Barton and Linda's apartment once they leave for Spain.

As The Mansion notes, the registrar in New York's city hall records marriages in the city - like the one between Linda Snopes and Barton Kohl.

The Indians in "Red Leaves" - or at least the tribal chief, the Man - practice polygamy, as is clear from the reference to "Issetibbeha dying among his wives" (329). This is Issetibbeha's "newest wife" (321), not Moketubbe's mother but the woman who tells him Moketubbe has hidden the red slippers that he has always coveted. She is unwilling to sleep in the gilt bed that Issetibbeha brought back from Paris, but no other details about her are provided.

These advertisers - presumably local businessmen and professionals - appear only hypothetically in "Go Down, Moses," when Mr. Wilmoth, the editor of the Jefferson paper, worries whether he'll lose "what few advertisers I have got" (262) for helping Stevens organize a funeral for a black man, Samuel Beauchamp.

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" imagines these boys selling newspapers announcing the England's entry into World War I as Spoomer's uncle predicts war "will be the making of the army" (513).

The "editor" of the local newspaper in "Death Drag" also does print jobs, like the handbill advertising the air show that Ginsfarb asks him to print (190). He expresses skepticism about the details of the performance, and when he demands payment in advance - "I ain't in this business for fun," he tells Ginsfarb - the job gets cancelled (191).

These "young fellers from the paper" who report the story of Mink Snopes' attempted prison break in The Mansion repeatedly ask him what his real name is, since "Mink" is "jest a nickname" (98).

In Light in August "the night marshal" joins Percy Grimm's squad of peacekeepers (456). When he does not join their poker game, some of the veterans jokingly call him an "M.P." and give him the Bronx cheer they learned to make during the war (457).

The job of Jefferson's night marshal includes enforcing an informal curfew by trying to get people off the streets during the night, although according to The Mansion his threats to the men who remain in the barbershop or poolroom at "two oclock on Sunday mornings" sound too vague to be effective. "If you boys don't quiet down and go home" - apparently he never finishes that sentence (203).

According to Gavin in The Mansion, "the rest of the world, at least that part of it in the United States, rates us folks in Mississippi at the lowest rung of culture" (167). This entry represents those people outside Mississippi - especially in the North.

Ike McCaslin's account of the Civil War in Go Down, Moses juxtaposes the leaders of the Confederate cause with the various Yankees who opposed them. This entry represents his roster of the economic elite in northern and western states that didn't secede: "the wildcat manipulators" and land speculators, "the bankers," the landlords and factory owners (273).

In Absalom! these are the "Northern people" who, at least in Miss Rosa's mind, have destroyed "the South" (5).

This prostitute in Light in August has just had sex with a black patron before Joe's "turn," so she responds with indifference when Christmas tries to provoke her by saying "that he is a negro" (225). In response, he beats her so badly that "at first they thought that the woman was dead" (225).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (70, 71; 206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (70, 206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers carpetbaggers, the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War.

These "officers" in Sanctuary who search the "ramshackle house" of the "old half-crazed white woman" who manufactures "spells for negroes" may be local policemen, or, since they are looking for whiskey, federal revenue agents (201). In any case, there is nothing alcoholic in the "collection of dirty bottles containing liquid" which they find (201). There must be at least three of them, because two of them "hold" the woman during the search (201).

The "official" on the train in Sanctuary who "shakes his fist" at Temple for jumping off at Taylor may be the conductor, or perhaps a chaperone from the college (36).