Character Keys

The Negro servants who work for the white population of Jefferson are almost completely invisible in Intruder in the Dust. This is by their own actions: anxious about what might happen after Lucas is arrested for killing a white man, they stop going outside, even to work. But their absence provokes two descriptions of who they are, or at least what they look like, under conventional circumstances. On Sunday morning Chick imagines the "housemaids or cooks in their fresh Sunday aprons" on the porches of their employers' homes (38).

According to Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, "all the men" who first came to Jefferson worked together to build it, "to shape a land for their posterity" (49); according to this account, "the jailer then" or the "innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler" could be "what the lawyer and planter and doctor and parson called a gentleman" (49). This definition of "all the men" leaves out the ones who were enslaved.

In Intruder in the Dust, "every tenant and renter and freeholder white or black in the neighborhood" would find a reason to go to the crossroads store on Saturdays, "quite often to buy something" but also often just to visit with each other (18).

The man who photographed Lucas and Molly for the studio portrait that Chick sees in their cabin in Intruder in the Dust is not described, but at Lucas' insistence he did take Molly's headrag off.

In Intruder in the Dust these three "youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" are all "a little drunk" in Fraser's store when Lucas Beauchamp enters (18). One of them, with "a reputation for brawling and violence," is more than a little racist: he goes after Lucas for his attitude, calling him "biggity" among other names (18, 19). (This crew is probably entirely different from the "[saw]mill crew" who are hired three years later by the Vinson and Crawford Gowrie.)

According to Intruder in the Dust, Mondays through Fridays these "owner-contractor-operators" drive the buses that carry the children of the county to school in town, but on Saturdays and holidays they turn the buses into "pay-passenger transport," charging the country people a fare to bring them to Jefferson (132).

This "old lady, dead now" is called a "spinster" by the narrator of Intruder in the Dust. She was "a neighbor" of Chick Mallison, who baked treats for "all the children on the street" and taught them to play a card game that she made sure she won (58).

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.

In Intruder in the Dust these "bachelor truck drivers" live in town in rented rooms and take their baths in the barbershop (39).

According to Intruder in the Dust, old houses like Miss Habersham's "still seem to be spellbound by the shades of women, old women still spinsters and widows waiting . . . waiting for the slow telegraph to bring them news of Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania battles" (117).

In "Knight's Gambit" Hence Cayley is the father of the "country girl" (192) who's been dating Max Harriss; according to her, "he dont think Max is any good" (193). His farm is "about two miles" from the Harriss place (192).

In "Knight's Gambit" Miss Cayley explains that before her marriage her "mother was a Mossop" (193).

John Doe is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but a name Gavin Stevens uses to represent the shared experience of the veterans of World War I. Talking about these survivors Gavin says: "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi," than the other vets from around the country (243).

Melissa Hogganbeck is a history teacher at the Jefferson Academy that Charles Mallison attends in "Knight's Gambit." Her "tireless cultured educated 'lady's' voice" makes it hard for him to endure the class which she "now called World Affairs with capitals on both” (209). She also teaches American History before 1865 at "the Academy" to Linda Snopes in The Town (301). If either she or her grandfather, who is also mentioned in the novel, are related to Boon Hogganbeck, who appears in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, the texts give no hint of it.

Charley Longfeather is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but is one of the three hypothetical men that Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, “I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Charley Longfeather of Shoshone, Idaho” (243).

In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison refers by name to the conductor of the train that takes him from training through Jefferson on his way to Texas: "Mr McWilliams, the conductor, was standing at the vestibule steps with his watch in his hand" (255).

Harry Wong is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Harry Wong of San Francisco" (243).

According to "Knight's Gambit," the elements of the uniform worn by the pilots of the Royal Air Force - "the blue of Britain and the hooked wings of a diving falcon and the modest braid of rank: but above all the blue, the color the shade which the handful of Anglo Saxon young men had established and decreed as [a] visual synonym of glory" - became so celebrated that "an association of American haberdashers or gents' outfitters had adopted it as a trade slogan" (206).

While hunting for the first time in Go Down, Moses Ash is talking about this "new light-colored woman who nursed next door to Major de Spain's" when he is surprised by a yearling bear in the path (309). It's clear that this young "nurse" - that is, wet nurse - has caught his eye, but nothing else about her is known. Our decision to identify her as biracial is based on the way 'light-colored' or '-complexioned' is used elsewhere in the fictions.

What Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" somewhat facetiously calls the "second" "American Expeditionary Force in France" that "began to land in Europe in 1919" are the many Americans who toured or moved to Europe in the years after the First World War (256). The "first" A.E.F., of course, were the one million soldiers in the U.S. Army who landed in France to join the British and French forces fighting Germany; they had returned home by 1919.

During the chess game with Uncle Gavin, the narrator in "Knight's Gambit" compares his thinking to that of "airmen," who measure duration "by contiguous and not elapsed time" (184).

In "Knight's Gambit" Harriss rents the plantation he inherits from his father-in-law to this "caretaker," a man who "didn’t even live in the county" but commutes from Memphis except during planting and harvest season, when he camps out in one the abandoned Negro cabins (159-60).

This character 'appears' in "Knight's Gambit" by way of one of Faulkner's typical negative formulations, in the middle of a sentence that develops the idea that Sebastian Gualdres is a "stranger" in Yoknapatawpha by noting that, when locals visit him at the Backus-Harriss Plantation, they are "guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father's and grandfather's too" - that is, they are his guests (174). But the point here is that this woman - Mrs.

Passing through Jefferson on his way from pre-flight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers" who are making one of their weekly visits to town (251). By 'hill farmers,' the narrative means the families that farm on the poorer land in the hilly parts of Yoknapatawpha county.

At the Greenbury hotel in "Knight's Gambit," Max Harriss is well known "to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" (208).

Several thousand Japanese sailors and aviators participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor that provoked the U.S. to declare war, but this entry reflects the unusual way Charles Mallison describes the attack in "Knight's Gambit": "a Jap dropped a bomb on another American" (254).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this woman becomes Zilphia's "partner" in the dressmaking shop less than a year after Mrs. Gant's death (378).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the one girl whom Zilphia has permission to visit and play with after school is not named or described, but after the two girls have grown up the narrative mentions her marriage (Zilphia herself makes the bride's "white gown," 374), and, after another four years, the birth of her first child, a daughter (for whom Zilphia makes dresses).

The "them" in the phrase "made them return her money" is the only reference in "Miss Zilphia Gant" to the people who own or work in the store where Mrs. Gant bought and then brought back a miniature cook stove (373).

In Light in August, Bobbie comes from a brothel in Memphis to the railroad town where she works for Max and Mame, by day as a waitress "in a small, dingy, back street restaurant" and by night as a prostitute. She responds to the romantic advances of 18-year old Joe Christmas, even though "she would never see thirty again" (172).

In Light in August, Bedenberry is preaching when Joe enters the Negro church and tries "to snatch him outen the pulpit" (323).

One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man.

In Light in August Lem Bush is the neighbor in Arkansas who takes Milly Hines to the circus in his wagon.

Joe's biological father in Light in August is called "a fellow with the circus" who tries to ride off with Milly Hines on a dark rainy night, but is shot and killed by Milly's father (374). He and Milly are together long enough for her to get pregnant. His legacy to his son, who is given the name Joe Christmas in the Memphis orphanage, is the mystery of his own racial identity. Doc Hines is convinced he is a Negro, i.e. in the racist world of segregation, has "nigger blood" (374). Milly apparently tries to tell her parents "the man is a Mexican" (374).

Mrs. Hines, the mother of Milly and grandmother of Joe Christmas, is described in Light in August as "a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair" (346). Early on, she is a much less vivid character than her dominating husband, whose religious fanaticism seems to control them both. Later, after she realizes that Joe Christmas is the grandson whom her husband had taken from her thirty-five years earlier, she takes charge of her husband, manages to visit Joe in jail, and seeks assistance on Joe's behalf.

Joe Christmas' story is the most developed of the various narrative lines in Light in August, though at its center is the unresolvable question of his racial identity. The novel refers to his skin more than once as "parchmentcolored" (120), but race in the world of the novel is defined by the (hypothetical) color of one's "blood," as black or white. Joe is not definitively one or the other. He is the illegitimate son of Milly Hines and a circus worker of uncertain lineage, left at Christmas time anonymously at an orphanage in Memphis by his grandfather, Doc Hines.

In Light in August Mame is a big, brass-haired woman. During the day she sits "like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield," behind a cigar case near the front of the dingy restaurant where Christmas meets Bobbie (175). At night she is the madam of the small town brothel which she runs with her husband.

Dollar is the Mottstown store-keeper in Light in August who tells the town about how Mrs. Hines retrieves her husband from the chair where she had left him and rents a car from Salmon to take them to Jefferson.

Introduced into Light in August in Chapter 19, twenty-five year old Grimm brings Joe Christmas' life to a violent end. A captain in the state national guard, he organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455). Like Christmas, Grimm's life seems strangely determined.

In Light in August Lena Grove's father dies in the same summer as her mother does, when Lena is twelve years old. Both parents have impressed upon her a sense of filial duty; she takes care of her father at her mother's dying request and goes to live with her brother McKinley in accordance with her father's wish.

Lena Grove is at the center of one of the three major plot lines in Light in August. Born in Alabama in 1912, she moved to her brother's house at the age of twelve, after her parents died. When the novel begins, she is around 21 years old, more than eight months pregnant, and traveling alone and on foot to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. Lena is a patient, trusting soul who feels no shame at her condition; she is also self-reliant, asking for no one's help yet accepting it gratefully during four weeks of traveling.

In Light in August McKinley Grove's wife is described as "labor- and childridden," spending "almost half of every year either pregant or "recovering" (5), so it is not surprising that she discovers her sister-in-law Lena's pregnancy and tells McKinley about it.

In Light in August Halliday is the resident of Mottstown who recognizes Joe Christman and, after hitting him in the face, captures him in the hope of claiming the thousand dollar reward.

The son of one Gail Hightower and the father of another, this man is never given a first name in Light in August. A "man of spartan sobriety" (472), in the years before the Civil War he "rides sixteen miles each Sunday to preach in a small Presbyterian chapel back in the hills" (468). He also opposes slavery and refuses to be served by his father's slaves.

Reverend Gail Hightower's story is one of the three principal plot lines in Light in August. After seminary, he worked hard to secure the position of minister to the Presbyterian church in Jefferson, the site where his grandfather had died in a Civil War raid twenty years before his own birth. His obsession with that grandfather results in his loss of his wife, his pulpit and his vocation. For most of the twenty-five years he has lived in Jefferson, he has been treated as a pariah: the narrative describes him as a "fifty-year-old outcast" (49), "tall, with thin . . .

The county sheriff in Light in August is named Watt Kennedy. Described as a "fat, comfortable man" (287), "with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face" (420), he investigates the murder of Joanna Burden and pursues Joe Christmas across the countryside (287). Like so many other characters in this novel, he never appears elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

In Light in August Simon McEachern is more than forty years old when he adopts the five-year-old Joe Christmas from the Memphis orphanage and takes him to the farm where he and his wife live. The narrative describes him as "somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless" (143-44). His voice is that "of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence" (142).

Mooney is the foreman at the planing mill where, for varying lengths of time, Bryon Bunch, Joe Christmas and 'Joe Brown' (i.e. Lucas Burch) all work in Light in August.

In Light in August Pomp (presumably short for 'Pompey') is Cinthy's husband and the first Gail Hightower's slave. Though called "boy," he is older than his master, and is completely bald (471). He follows his master to war and refuses to believe that he could have been killed in the cavalry raid in Jefferson. Pomp himself is reportedly killed after attacking "a Yankee officer with a shovel" in an attempt to see or perhaps rescue "Marse Gail" (476-77).