Character Keys

In The Mansion Mink sees this engineer "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39).

The flagman who helps Doc and Mrs. Hines into the vestibule at the railroad station in Light in August is not described.

The "lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh" to whom, at the end of Flags in the Dust, Horace gives the letter he has written to Narcissa back in Jefferson (374).

In The Unvanquished Bayard twice mentions the "workmen" (225) who build Colonel Sartoris' railroad line to Jefferson. He pays them on "Saturdays" (220).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished there is a large group of Negroes who sought freedom with the Union army but who are turned over to Rosa Millard because of a clerical error. They are part of a much larger group of self-emancipated slaves, to Bayard it "looks like a thousand" (52, 110), who are waiting beside the pile of confiscated chests and the pen full of confiscated mules when Rosa Millard presents the faulty requisition order that calls for "110 Negroes of both sexes" to be "repossessed" to her (54, 112).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for causing the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the wildcat manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites" (273).

The reference to this character|these characters in The Mansion is a good example of how hard it is to create data entries for many of the inhabitants of Faulkner's imaginative world. As part of the novel's description of Jake Wattman's moonshine operation, the narrator refers to the "recurrent new reform-administration sheriff" in Yoknapatawpha who hopes to raid it (244). "Sheriff" is singular. "Recurrent," however, suggests more than one sheriff.

Hightower's wife in Light in August is the only child of "one of the ministers, the teachers" in the seminary he attends (479), but this icon represents the imaginary "family" that Hightower invents to explain his wife's periodical absences in Memphis. He tells the congregation she has gone to visit them "downstate somewhere" (63).

In The Hamlet the orphaned Lucy Pate was raised by this remote relation; she imbued Lucy with the "domestic skill" of a "country heritage" and the values of "constancy and devotion" (227).

These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers.

Flags in the Dust characterizes the residents of Horace's new 'home' town - where he is clearly in exile - negatively. They have turned a Mississippi hamlet into a prosperous but squalid town. The engine of its economy is a factory making an unspecified product from the local cypress trees, which are all being chopped down. The narrator labels this populace with a series of pejorative terms, including "brigands" and "bugs" (373).

Sanctuary describes the people who live in "the restricted district" of Memphis through which Red's funeral procession passes in terms of their "faces," which "peer from beneath lowered shades" as it goes by (249). While it is not absolutely clear what "restricted district" refers to, the point of this passage seems to be to juxtapose two worlds in Memphis: the underworld and the respectable (but intimidated) citizenry.

In Flags in the Dust Will Falls distributes the "pint of whisky" that is always part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas gift baskets given him by the Sartorises "among his ancient and homeless cronies" (301) in the county poorhouse.

None of these people are mentioned as individuals in The Town, but Gavin and Charles pay a visit to this community, where the local population was "having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181).

Although the narrator of "Centaur in Brass" says that "we" often saw Mrs. Snopes working in her husband's restaurant, he later suggests that most of the customers there were men from the surrounding countryside. Major Hoxey eats there, but he looks out of place "among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces" of the other diners (151).

In The Town there are "half a dozen strangers not even kin to Snopeses by marriage" who are eating in the restaurant when Eck asks about what is really in the hamburgers he's cooking (34).

Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222).

The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184).

Jack Crenshaw and this man whom The Town does not name are federal officers, "revenue field agents" (182), who "are just interested in whiskey, not photography" (183). They find the moonshine whiskey in Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio. (As officials whose task it is to make sure all alcohol production is properly taxed, 'revenuers' play a prominent role in the lore of moonshine whiskey.)

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the "revenue officers and deputies" whom Lucas remembers worked for the U.S. government (215, 61). Selling or buying alcohol was illegal by Mississippi state law, but in general the moonshiners who made and sold whiskey were prosecuted for evading federal tax regulations.

In Sanctuary, the woman who owns the limousine in which Popeye's grandmother leaves him becomes a kind of godmother to the child, making sure Popeye gets medical attention and often bringing him "to her home in afternoons and for holidays" (308). The narrative does not explain her motives in trying to help, but does show how they come to grief when her attempt to give him a birthday party is defeated by his violent antisocial behavior. Even after Popeye is sent to "a home for incorrigible children" (309), this woman continues to help Popeye's mother support herself (309).

One of the men Colonel Sartoris kills in Flags in the Dust is called "that robber" by Will Fall; the context suggests he was trying to rob the money Sartoris carried as he was building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha. (This character and "that other feller" Sartoris kills in this novel seem combined into the character of the unnamed "hill man" in The Unvanquished, 23.)

In his sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog refers to the Romans who hunt for the newborn Jesus as both the "po-lice" and as "sojers" (296).

The "runaway slave" mentioned in Absalom! is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites).

In The Mansion when Linda Snopes Kohl tells the Mallisons "about the people" in the Spanish Civil War, she includes "a Russian poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed" (241). It's not clear whom Faulkner has in mind, if he has a real poet in mind at all, but since the other two writers Linda mentions - Hemingway and Malraux - are historical figures who were in Spain, he may mean Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who was killed fighting for the Republicans in that war.

The "men who said the ship [Sutpen sails on] was going to the West Indies" in Absalom! (197) may not have been sailors or shipmates, but the inference seems justified by the narrative fact that Sutpen "learns to be a sailor" to get himself to the Caribbean (200).

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, the man who attempts to sell Lucas Beauchamp a metal detector is "young, not yet thirty, with the assurance, the slightly soiled snap and dash, of his calling" (226, 76). When he falls for Lucas' story about buried treasure he ends up renting the machine from Lucas to search for the money on his own.

According to the story Joanna tells about her family in Light in August, when her father married his first wife, Juana, this saloon keeper lent some mosquito netting to Nathaniel's sisters to use for making a wedding veil.

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).

The children Addie taught before her marriage in As I Lay Dying are described only from her point of view, which is an avowedly hateful one. To her, they are represented by their "little dirty snuffling noses" (169). She takes pleasure in the thought that when she whips them for "faulting" in school, she becomes part of their "secret and selfish" lives (170).

In Absalom! the one-room Virginia school that Sutpen attends "for about three months" is "full of children three or four years younger than he" - i.e. 8-10 years old - and "three or four years further advanced" (194).

The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in The Town: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153).

In The Sound and the Fury the unnamed little girl who walks home from school with the Burgess girl is "scared" of Benjy, though her friend assures her that "he wont hurt you" (53).

When the present day of his section in The Sound and the Fury Benjy reaches the gate in front of the Compson house, he thinks of it as the place "where the girls passed with their booksatchels" (51). He may simply be remembering the girls who walked past over a decade ago, or more probably is referring to a new generation of girls who walk past his house in 1928.

This school principal in The Mansion recommends that Tug Nightingale "quit" school after he got "almost as far as the fourth grade" (202).

The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends in Absalom! is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195).

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott's colleague is watching when Wallstreet proposes to Miss Vaiden (153).

The unnamed secessionists with whom Charles Stuart Compson is associated in "Appendix Compson" endeavored to "secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain" (327). The plotters are headed by General James Wilkinson, whose real-life attempts to sell land to Spain were backed by a number of prominent Kentuckians.

in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" the "second goat owner" lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139).

In the last section of "Miss Zilphia Gant," the title character returns to Jefferson after a three-year absence, "in mourning," with "a plain gold band" on her hand, "and a child" (381). She tells people about "her second marriage and her husband's death" (381), but it seems most likely that this husband is a figment of Miss Zilphia's imagination and a way to explain that child. In any case, just like the painter whom Zilphia did marry, he's never given a name, and so effectively she remains 'Miss Zilphia' - the name the narrator uses throughout.

According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). It seems likely that, even if Harriss died in a different way, the "secretary" referred to here exists, and did make this call to Mrs. Harris, who is in Europe at the time her husband dies.

According to the narrator of Flags in the Dust, "each spring" a "certain few young girls" are allowed to pick flowers from the lawn at the Benbow house (164). Since they "ask permission" we can infer that they are polite (164). Their class status can be inferred from the first two adjectives that the narrator uses to describe them.

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).

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).

In The Sound and the Fury this "man who mutilated himself" by cutting off his genitals with a "broken razor" is known to readers only through Quentin's recollection of a story Versh tells him (116).

The Backus estate has a whole slew of "butlers and footmen" just for their horses; Melisandre also has an extensive domestic staff of "maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries" (218). Later the "Negro houseman and one of the maids" are mentioned (399). The Mansion does not provide any more details, but it's safe to assume that, like the houseman, most of these employees are black, but given the racial categorization in Yoknapatawpha, it's likely that the 'secretaries' are not.

In the fantasy of Flem in hell in The Hamlet, these minions - the text refers to them only as "they" and "them" (166) - carry messages between their master and Snopes. One of them is individualized as an "old fellow" who "used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy" (168), but none of them are described. The dialect in which they speak is one that is conventionally associated with the lower class and the rural south: Flem's soul, they say, "wasn't no big one to begin with nohow" (166).

These "sewing women" make the trousseau for Elly's wedding, coming to her house "daily" after the engagement to Philip is announced (214). Their race is not specified, which typically means 'white' in Faulkner's fiction, but at the same time domestic workers in the fiction are typically 'black,' so we have chosen to call these women's race unknown.