Character Keys

In Light in August Simms may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill.

In Light in August Roz is the grandson of Pappy Thompson; he is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull.

An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324).

In Light in August Mrs. Waller reports the fire at the Burden place to the sheriff after she and her husband discover the burning house and Joanna's murdered body.

In her "terror and . . . ratlike desperation," the girl riding in the car that Christmas flags down in Light in August tries to defend herself against him with the threat of her "pappy and brothers" who live "right up yonder!" (285). She seems too frightened to be making them up.

The messenger in Light in August who tells Nathaniel Burden’s family about the "trouble" he got into in Mexico refers to the Mexicans as "them Spanish" and alludes to their animus against “white men” (244). He obviously thinks of Hispanic/Spanish as non-white, but our database follows the practice of identifying both Hispanic and Spanish racially as 'white.'

In Light in August, when Grimm asks the "commander of the local Post" about organizing a group to preserve the peace in Jefferson after Christmas is arrested, this man says no. "I couldn't use the Post like that. After all, we are not soldiers now" (452).

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man asks what the sheriff will say about them carrying pistols.

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). Because he holds "the equivalent of a commissioned rank," this young man is appointed by Grimm as the "second in command" of the platoon he forms (456). He is the one who, on Grimm's orders, turns on the "fire alarm" after Christmas escapes (458).

In Light in August, when Hines realizes his daughter Milly is pregnant, he "starts out to find a doctor that would fix it" (377). He does not succeed, but according to his wife, he does "beat up a doctor in another town" (378), possibly because he refuses to perform an abortion.

In Light in August this woman shrieks in a "shrill voice" when the car in which she is riding passes Joe Christmas standing naked at the side of the road (108).

In Light in August the superintendent in Jefferson's Presbyterian church orders the organist to play to distract the congregation from Mrs. Hightower's behavior during a church service.

When a wagon in a traveling circus gets stuck near the Hines' home in Light in August, "the men" borrow tackle to move it from Doc Hines (373). One of these men, presumably, is the man who will become Joe Christmas' biological father; as the Unnamed Father of Joe Christmas he has his own entry in this index.

In Light in August these officials and board members of Negro schools and colleges in the South regularly correspond with Joanna Burden, from whom they seek and receive business, financial, and religious advice. Joanna assumes that any of them would admit Joe Christmas to their school on her account.

From these "Confederate pickets close to the enemy's front" in Light in August it is learned that Pomp has been trying to get behind Yankee lines to find his missing master, whom he believes is a prisoner of war (476).

The father of the woman whom Reverend Hightower marries is also a minister, and a teacher at the seminary where she and Hightower meet.

The description in "Knight's Gambit" of the people who watch the polo matches at the Harriss plantation includes (separate from the "farmers" and "the tenants and renters and croppers") a group it calls "the landholders" (163). This presumably refers to the owners of the farm land that is worked by the tenants, renters and sharecroppers, though Faulkner usually refers to them as landlords or land owners - or "planters," the word he uses elsewhere in the story: "the bottomland planters” (251).

When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he has a kind of prevision of the local young men who will soon be killed in the fighting, and the grief of "those who had created" them, without realizing that the day would come when their child "might die in agony" in a foreign place they "had never even heard of before" and didn't even know how to pronounce (251).

The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit.

In "Knight's Gambit" the animals on the Harris plantation are very well attended to. There are not only "grooms" for the horses (234), but also "special human beings to wait on" the dogs (165).

The nursemaid who takes care of Mrs. Harriss' son Max in "Knight's Gambit" is "a light-colored Negress a good deal smarter, or at least snappier-looking than any other woman white or black either in Jefferson" (158). The Mansion also refers to this character as "the nurse," but does not otherwise describe her (217).

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).

Passing through Jefferson from preflight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators" (251). "Operators" here seems to mean 'managers.'

Although he is something of a private detective himself, Gavin Stevens hires this private detective to surveil Max Harriss in Memphis; as he puts it, "A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it" (201).

The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).

"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163).

In "Knight's Gambit" the tutors employed to educate the Harriss children at home are described, with some irony, as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145).

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)

During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).

According to Uncle Gavin in "A Name for the City," this child provides useful and necessary assistance to the magnificent Greek poet, Homer.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, these "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200, 4). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204, 9).

In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

The "Burnside" who makes the list of men who heard the "hackle-lifting" rebel yell in Requiem for a Nun had command of the Union Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 (referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi.

Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)

At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.

Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.

Ernest Hemingway was the American writer whom Faulkner considered his rival for most of his career, though the two men had a cordial long distance relationship and Faulkner often alluded to or quoted from Hemingway in public statements. In Requiem for a Nun Temple alludes to Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to explain that a woman who has been sexually assaulted could be in denial that it had happened to her: "it had never actually happened to a g-- woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged" (121).

Benjamin Humphreys (Faulkner misspells his name in Requiem for a Nun) was a Southern officer during the Civil War who turned to politics during Reconstruction. In October, 1865, he was elected Governor of Mississippi as a Democrat. As an unpardoned Confederate he was ineligible to serve by the terms of surrender, so he had himself inaugurated and sworn in. In June, 1868, Federal troops were used forcibly to remove him from office. He was a strong advocate of Jim Crow laws as a way to deny freed slaves their rights as citizens.

Louis LeFleur was a French Canadian voyageur, or explorer. The "trading-post store" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun on the bluffs above the Pearl River became the seed for the city of Jackson (84). He married a local Choctaw, the daughter of a chief, and had a son named Greenwood Le Flore, who also appears in the novel's cast of characters.

As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed.

A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, Patton became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182).

The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).

In Requiem for a Nun, these are the eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. It seems likely that at least some of them, like the canoes they traveled in, are Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada.

In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).