Character Keys

"Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and also The Hamlet refer briefly to the "imported English architect" who designed the "huge house" and the "formal grounds and gardens" at the Old Frenchman's place (136). In Flags in the Dust the Benbow house in Jefferson was also designed in the 1840s by an English architect, though not necessarily the same one.

Intruder in the Dust includes the story of this architect, a "city man" who drives into Jefferson and crashes his expensive car into one of the stores on the Square (53). He treats his time in jail as an adventure, and tries to get the town to sell him the jail's antique "handhewn" door and hardware (53).

The architect who designs the mansion and grounds at Sutpen's Hundred is identified in Absalom! as "French," but in this novel he comes to Yoknapatawpha from the French Caribbean: "all the way from Martinique" (26). When he is mentioned again in Requiem for a Nun he is identified as the "tame Parisian architect" (30).

One of the three people in Sanctuary who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit is "a fellow policeman" of the murdered officer (311). We learn nothing about his testimony, or whether he is sincerely mistaken.

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).

Never given a first name, Winterbottom is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who has a small role in two texts and is mentioned in a third. He is present at the auction in "Spotted Horses." Light in August begins when Lena Grove walks past his farm. And Flem Snopes mentions that he boarding "at Winterbottom's" near the end of The Hamlet (388).

Wilkie is mentioned by Mrs. Bland in The Sound and the Fury, when she tells the young people in her car about Gerald's grandfather back in Kentucky who insisted on picking "his own mint" for his juleps: "He wouldn't even let old Wilkie touch it" (148). It seems safe to say that Wilkie was a servant in the Bland family.

Walter Ewell is a farmer in Yoknapatawpha, but in the six fictions where he appears or is mentioned he is always described as (to quote The Mansion) one of the "best hunters in the county" (34) - an assertion born out repeatedly on the annual hunting trips to Major de Spain's camp in the woods. When the unnamed boy in "The Bear" hunts his first deer on his own it is symbolically appropriate that "he borrows Walter Ewell's rifle" to do so (290).

In "Death Drag" Vernon owns the café where Captain Warren and Jock talk. He seems like an attentive and successful businessman; people know his place by his name, and Jock and Captain Warren seem comfortable there. He may be the same "Vernon" who is married to the Sheriff's daughter in The Sound and the Fury, though there is no direct evidence of that. He is certainly not the Vernon - Vernon Tull - who lives in Frenchman's Bend.

In "Raid" and then again in The Unvanquished, this woman informs Rosa Millard that she and her party have entered Mississippi.

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).

These characters are created by an implication in "That Evening Sun." When Mr. Compson tells Nancy that she should "just let white men alone" (295), he suggests that Mr. Stovall may not be the only white man with whom she has had sex. So by that implication, these are the other men who buy sex from Nancy.

In The Reivers, this "white man" is the "blackguard" who takes advantage of Bobo's "country-bred" naivete to get him in debt, and then forces him to steal the horse named Coppermine (281).

"Red Leaves" says that "a white man" taught Issetibbeha how to take snuff (321). It does not say anything about the man.

In "A Courtship" this man is introduced in the discussion of the new laws that came into the "American" part of Mississippi after Issetibbeha and General Jackson signed a treaty. The narrator mentions "the white man [who] disappeared" under suspicious circumstances and the "uproar" that followed, which included rumors that "he had been eaten," presumably by Indians (361). The narrator is quite sure he had not been eaten, because "he had been the sort of white man which even other white men did not regret" (361), but that is all we learn about him.

In Intruder in the Dust Lucas commissions "a white boy . . . on a mule" to carry the gallon bucket of molasses he is giving Chick into town (22).

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).

This waiter works in the Chicago night club at the end of Flags in the Dust. Described as having "a head like a monk's," he struggles with the woman who has stolen the drunken Harry Mitchell's diamond tiepin, though there is no way to know if his intention is to return it or to keep it for himself (388).

These are the Union troops, identified by Drusilla as "a brigade of cavalry" (45, 91), whom Bayard describes at the bridge over the river in "Raid" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished. Some of them are holding the crowd of self-emancipated slaves away from the bridge, others are preparing to blow it up, still others are described as "riding up and down the cliff" above the water or bivouacked "down at the water" (51, 108).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished the group of Union soldiers who help Ringo and Bayard drag Rosa Millard and the wagon on shore after they cross the river are identified as a "Yankee patrol" (51, 108).

While no Union troops appear directly in "Skirmish at Sartoris," either as a story or as a chapter in The Unvanquished, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (58, 188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (65, 198).

These are the first Union troops to appear in Jefferson, according to "My Grandmother Millard": a "Yankee scouting patrol" that was apparently looking for General Compson "over a year ago" (675). That would have been before April, 1861 - implausibly early in the Civil War for Union troops to be moving through Mississippi.

This is the first of the Union units engaged by the narrative of "My Grandmother Millard": the "whole regiment of Yankee cavalry" that, according to Ab Snopes, is "half a mile down the road" from the Sartoris place (674). (A Union regiment could be as large as 1000 men.)

Specific Union troops who appear in the various stories that Will Falls and Aunt Jenny tell in Flags in the Dust have their own separate entries in the data. This entry represents the unspecified groups of Union soldiers and officers who are mentioned - often with extreme bias - in the novel. For example, the "drunken Yankee generals [who] set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built" that Aunt Jenny refers to (50).

In Flags in the Dust and again in "Retreat" both as a short story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union soldiers is captured by Colonel Sartoris. In the first novel he does so single-handedly, but in the next to he has some (involuntary) help from Bayard and Ringo. In those two texts we assume this group is the "column of Yankee infantry" that earlier passes by Bayard and his father's troop hiding in the woods (30, 67).

The Union Army is only mentioned in The Hamlet, in the novel's reference to the groups of Union soldiers who patrolled the roads of Frenchman's Bend during the Civil War.

The Union Army in Absalom! is an unseen but important force. When "Yankee troops" pass near Yoknapatawpha at some point in the Civil War (66), for example, Coldfield's two Negro servants and "all of Sutpen's" slaves "follow the Yankee troops away" (67).

In both Flags in the Dust and "Retreat" as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union cavalry rides up to the Sartoris plantation hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris. In all three texts he is able to fool them long enough to escape, but in the last two the Yankees then dig up the family's buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

The "Uncle Job" in The Sound and the Fury works at the hardware store where Jason Compson also works. In one of his racist rants, Jason calls him "an old doddering nigger" (251), but while Jason also complains about Job's laziness, during the course of the day April 6, 1928, he is shown assembling new cultivators and delivering merchandise. Earl, the man both Job and Jason work for, says "I can depend on him" (248).

"Uncle Dick" is white, so the honorific "Uncle" in his case has a different connotation than it does for the Negro 'uncles' in Yoknapatawpha. In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," and again in The Hamlet, where the story of hidden treasure at the Old Frenchman's place is re-told, he is "a shriveled little old man . . . with a long white beard" (144, 379). He wears "a filthy frock coat," lives in "a mud-daubed hut" in a swamp, and is reputed to eat "frogs and snakes [and] bugs as well" (144, 381).

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, these are the "two strange white men" whom Lucas believes "came in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um" (227, 78).

Buck Turpin is probably a merchant or businessman in Jefferson. In The Sound and the Fury he owns the lot in which the traveling show that performs in town over the Easter weekend sets up its tent, being paid $10 for that.

This is the younger of the two Turpins mentioned in The Mansion. Like the older one, he is associated with Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the hill country. Gavin Stevens recalls that he failed to "answer his draft call" during World War II (459). He is presumably related to the older Turpin, and perhaps to the Turpin family that appears in Flags in the Dust, but the novel does not say how.

Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72).

In The Reivers Lucius describes the (white) passengers who ride on the "Special," the major train that runs between Memphis and New York, as "the rich women in diamonds and the men with dollar cigars" (194). He also mentions the "Negroes" in the "Jimcrow" half of the train's smoking car (194); see Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 1. ("Jimcrow," usually written Jim Crow, is a synonym for the Southern system of racial segregation.)

When in The Mansion Mink watches people getting off and on the train at the Jefferson station, he thinks of them as "rich men and women"; when he thinks of the people on the train itself, he thinks of them as "the other rich ones" (38). They certainly have more money than Mink, but are probably mostly middle-class; under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white. (Near he end of the novel he remembers these people forty years later, 445.)

In As I Lay Dying, Darl notes "the heads turning like the heads of owls" as he is taken down the aisle of the train car, laughing (253). These other passengers have an obvious reason to stare at him. (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

The "Tom" in The Town is a customer at the Sartoris bank who cannot read Colonel Sartoris' handwriting on the loan he is trying to take out (147-148).

The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" describes Tobe as "an old man-servant - a combined gardener and cook" (119), and never refers to him except as "the Negro" or "the Negro man" (120, 122, etc.). The only time we hear his name is when Emily uses it to summon him (121). He appears to have been in her employ since he was "young man" (122), and at least since the time her father died. Earlier drafts of "A Rose for Emily" include an extended conversation between him and Emily. His role in the published version of the story is entirely silent and elusive.

The "Pettigrew" in the short story "Beyond" is Judge Allison's attorney and the executor of his will, responsible for making sure that the Judge's last wishes are implemented - though he doesn't seem to do so. In Requiem for a Nun - published almost two decades after "Beyond" - a man named 'Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew' is the source of the name of the town that is the seat of Yoknapatawpha county, but it's not likely Faulkner is consciously thinking of a connection between the characters.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the neighbors of the Gant family are, like many other groups of people in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, a nosy, gossipy bunch. When Gant's assistant goes to the local store to complain about his treatment, he finds them "gathered at the store" already talking about "the pistol incident" - that is, about Mrs.

The narrator of "A Courtship" uses the phrase "the People" to describe the tribe to which he and the other Indian characters in the story belong, as in this sentence: "The People all lived in the Plantation now" (361). He does not explicitly say they are Chickasaws, the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in most of Faulkner's references to the indigenous population, but that they are part of the Chickasaw nation can be inferred from his reference to David Colbert as "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

In Light in August Percy Grimm commandeers the bicycle of a "hulking youth in the uniform of the Western Union" (459).

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.

The story "Skirmish at Sartoris" briefly acknowledges the many enslaved people who sought freedom by emancipating themselves as the Union Army passed through Mississippi. Groups of these people, and a few of them as individuals, are described in some detail in the earlier story "Raid." The chapter "Skirmish at Sartoris" in the novel The Unvanquished revises the reference in "Skirmish" to the "Negroes" who "passed in the road [beside Hawkhurst] all night long" (59) as "the niggers passing in the road" at night (189).

The first set of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are on the road, trying to catch up with the Union Army as it moves across Mississippi. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40).

There is a Frenchman's Bend character named "Samson" in both As I Lay Dying, where he narrates a section of the narrative, and Light in August, where only his name appears. In the first novel, he lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. The barn suggests he is farmer, but when his section begins he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112), which may mean he also owns a country store.

In The Mansion this "Four-F potato chip salesman" ran off with Mrs. Goodyhay while Goodyhay himself was serving in World War II (294).

The narrator of "Tomorrow" refers once to "all the people in our country - the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners" (91). He is explaining that, despite his Uncle Gavin's formal education at Harvard and Heidelberg, he knows how to talk to "all the people" so that they understand him. This is a rare passage in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which the population of the county is aggregated across racial and class lines, though the intent of the passage is apparently to praise Gavin rather than the county's shared community.