Character Keys

In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute.

The county sheriff in The Sound and the Fury is a man with "vigorous untidy iron-gray hair and his gray eyes were round and shiny like a little boy's" (301-02). He exercises his judgment - about Jason Compson in particular - when he refuses to help Jason chase after his niece on Easter Sunday. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The unnamed county sheriff who appears in "A Point of Law" is not described in any detail. In the companion short story "Gold Is Not Always," the sheriff is only mentioned. When Faulkner combined these stories into the chapter in Go Down, Moses called "The Fire and the Hearth," he describes the sheriff who plays the same roles as "a tremendous man, fat" (62). We assume these are all the same character in Faulkner's imagination.

While the sheriff of Yoknapatawpha never appears in person in "Knight's Gambit," Robert Markey mentions him when he tells Gavin Stevens that "your sheriff will have to send someone" to help take Max Harriss into custody (232). Later Stevens mentions a different officer of the law when he instructs his nephew to send a message to the Memphis police that includes this phrase: "use police per request Jefferson chief if necessary” (214). While the county sheriff is a familiar character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, there is no other mention in them of a "chief" of police.

The sheriff never appears in "Dry September," but is mentioned by Hawkshaw when he tries to prevent the lynching: "Let's get the sheriff and do this thing right" (172). (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions. Obviously in some of these cases - at least when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment - Faulkner may be thinking of the same unnamed character, or one of the half dozen "Sheriff Hampton"s who also appear in the fictions, but from the texts themselves there is no way to establish that.)

The county sheriff in "The Hound" is unnamed. He is described as "past middle-age," "a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt" who smokes a corn cob pipe (156). At first he seems more concerned with his "supper" than with investigating Houston's disappearance (158), but that seems at least in part a disguise. He figures out how to identify and capture the killer, and transports him to jail with both professional care and human respect, while making sure that they eat on the way and also will be "home for supper" on time (163).

This sheriff is only mentioned in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as a story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished. After killing the two Burdens, John Sartoris tells his followers that he plans to find the sheriff and "make bond" (208). The office of Sheriff was different from the office of Marshal that is at stake in the election. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

In "Monk," the county sheriff is mentioned by negation, as a way to characterize the hill country in the eastern part of the county from which Monk hails: according to the narrator, the area is so dangerous to outsiders that not even the sheriff will go there. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The captain of the ship that carries Horace back to the U.S. in Flags in the Dust seems fairly phlegmatic: when Horace's glass-blowing starts a fire in his cabin on board, at least according to Horace's account, he "decides that I'd better not try it again" until the reach land (138).

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 The Sound and the Fury the old "man in a dirty apron" Jason spots at the train carrying the traveling show in Mottson is probably a cook. Though smaller than Jason, he becomes a "puny fury" when he feels Jason has insulted him, driving to get to his "butcher knife" and then attacking Jason with a "rusty hatchet" (309-10). As the owner of the show later tells Jason, warning him to stay away from the show, "That damn little wasp'll kill you" (312).

As part of his fiction about loaning his car to a showman in The Sound and the Fury, Jason invents an adulterous "brother-in-law" involved with "some town woman" (258).

In "Red Leaves" Doom is described as "one of three children" (317), but the narrative does not say if his siblings are male or female.

The phrase the narrator of "A Courtship" uses to describe Herman Basket's sister - "she walks in beauty" - sounds faintly 'Indian' but is actually borrowed from Lord Byron (362). Or "sat in it, that is," he adds - which sounds pretty risque, though becomes less so when he adds that she doesn't walk at all "unless she had to" (362). Like Eula Varner in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, she is lazy and slovenly but exercises an irresistible power over all the men who see her. While she is at the center of the story's courtship plot, she does not actually speak a single word in it.

Readers meet Granny's sister Louisa Hawk, who lives in Alabama, but both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished refer to another sister, who is neither named nor described but only mentioned: Granny explains the trip she's taking by saying that "My sister lives in Memphis, we are going there" (24, 56). Since "Millard" is Granny's married name, we have no way of knowing the name of her sister; however, she may be the mother of Cousin Melisandre who appears in "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek."

In "Delta Autumn," this woman, Ike McCaslin's "dead wife's niece," lives in his house in Jefferson with her children and looks after him during the fifty weeks of the year he is not in the woods (274). In Go Down, Moses this same woman is called his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), but in the first mention of her, in the very beginning of the novel, she is "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" (6). Faulkner either mis-remembered the story when he wrote "sister" or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" later.

This slave appears in the only scene in The Sound and the Fury from the time that the Compsons owned slaves - what Versh calls the "old time" (69). He appears in the story about Grandfather Compson and one of his slaves that Dilsey told Versh, as Versh repeats it to Benjy (who of course cannot understand it at all). According to the story, because Benjy's Grandfather changed the man's name (a common practice during slavery), the man became both a preacher and a "bluegum" (69).

In "Wash" this "house servant" - also called a "Negress" - is "one of the few Negroes who remained" at Sutpen's after the Sherman and the "Federal troops" had passed through (537). She refuses to allow Wash Jones to enter the Sutpen mansion while Sutpen is away at the war - not even by way of "the kitchen steps" (537). (Her treatment of Wash anticipates the character of Clytemnestra in Absalom, Absalom!, but there is no hint in the story that she is related to the white family she serves.)

In "Red Leaves" Doom had a slave as a personal servant. At his death many years earlier, this unnamed slave also ran away to avoid being killed and buried with his master - but he too was pursued and captured.

Described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as "the General's body servant," this unnamed slave provides a kind of sound track to Aunt Jenny's story of Stuart and Carolina Bayard as "two angels valiantly fallen": he strums a "guitar in lingering random chords" at the Confederate unit's camp (12).

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, the "Anglo-Saxon pioneer" (81) was followed by wealthier settlers who built the "river towns" like Vicksburg and Natchez, "men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats, who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds" (82). Included in this group is the first planter to grow cotton in the region - "someone brought a curious seed into the land . . . and now vast fields of white" covered the land (83).

When he returns to the Burden place after Lena's baby is born in Light in August, Hightower has a brief vision of the antebellum plantation that it once was, and in particular of "the rich fecund black life of the quarters," the "fecund [enslaved] women" and their "prolific naked children" (407).

These are the enslaved people in "Wash" who call Wash "white trash behind his back" (536), and to his face pointedly ask him "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). When they do that, Wash can see their "white eyes and teeth behind which derision lurked" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).

Requiem for a Nun mentions the "Negro slaves" who belonged to the men who settled the territory around what became Jackson (82), but as is also the case with most of the "slaves" in Yoknapatawpha it mentions, these enslaved people are not described in any way.

The narrators of "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun note that the first slaves brought into Yoknapatawpha belonged to Grenier, a man better known as the Old Frenchman. The slaves who worked on his huge plantation before the Civil War appear, though tangentially, in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet.

In "Red Leaves" these are the forty slaves who are sold by Issetibbeha to a Memphis trader. He uses the money to go to Europe.

In "A Justice" Doom and the Chocktaws own a sizable number of black slaves. Four of them are briefly traded - along with the six slaves he has recently won on the steamboat from New Orleans - to two unnamed white men for the grounded riverboat which Doom then has moved by slaves to his plantation.

A number of Mississippi Indians did own slaves, and in "Red Leaves" and "A Justice," Faulkner's other Indian stories, he explores this theme in detail. In "A Courtship," however, it only appears in the narrator's brief mention of the black people whom Ikkemotubbe brings with him when he returns to the plantation three years after the story's main events: the "eight new slaves which we did not need" (363), later referred to as "the eight more slaves which we had no use for" (379).

In a passage Faulkner added to "Retreat" when the story was published as a chapter in The Unvanquished, Bayard describes the unconventional way Buck and Buddy treat the large number of enslaved people they inherited from their father. The two white slave-owners move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" (46), and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night.

Like other Indian tribes in the old South, the Indians of Yoknapatawpha own slaves in various Faulkner fictions. The slaves of the Chickasaw who appear in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are specifically referred to as the slaves of Mohataha, Ikketubbe's mother who rules the tribe in those texts. In the short story and in Act I of the novel, these enslaved people purchase items at the Indian agency-store in the settlement (17).

None of The Unvanquished stories ever refer directly to the slaves who worked for the Sartorises in the fields. In "Vendee" as both a short story and a chapter in the novel, Ab Snopes tells Bayard that Rosa Millard's death came as a result of what Ab and Rosa were doing "for [Bayard's] sake and his paw and them niggers" (109, 174).

As the proprietor of the largest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, Sutpen owned a much larger group of slaves than his original twenty slaves from the Caribbean and the additional several slaves whom the narrator specifically refers to. Absalom! notes, for example, that over the years the "wild" Negroes whom Sutpen "had brought into the country" mix with other enslaved Negroes - "the tame which was already there" (67).

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" this polite "small boy in overalls" whom Suratt sees beside the barn three miles from town does not get his joke about Flem and goats (140).

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).

When Minnie Cooper starts drinking in "Dry September," the "youth" who supplies her with whiskey is identified as "a clerk at the soda fountain" (175). (Selling liquor was illegal in Yoknapatawpha, except that doctors and drugstores could dispense it for medicinal purposes, which probably explains how this clerk has access to the alcohol.)

At the request of Mrs. McKellogg, a soldier driving "a big car" takes the Grier boy home from Memphis in "Two Soldiers" (99).

Colonel Sartoris' first military command was the regiment that he raised at the beginning of the Civil War. According to Uncle Buck McCaslin in "Retreat," Sartoris "bought and paid for" it, which presumably means that Sartoris underwrote the costs of arming and equipping the unit, though no further details about that process are provided (21).

This is the "somebody at the City Hall" in The Town who is informed about the missing brass fixtures at the power plant and calls in "the auditors" to investigate the matter (31).

This is the "someone (not General Compson)" in Absalom! who is in Jefferson in 1833 on the day Sutpen arrives and who looks into his covered wagon to see what or who is there (27).

To explain his father's decision to move east to the Tidewater, Sutpen speculates in Absalom! about a "somebody" who might have influenced the decision, and comes up with three different possibilities: "somebody, some traveler," who praised the quality of life in the Tidewater; or "perhaps somebody his father knew once . . . [who] happened to think about him; or "someone kin to him . . . [who] had sent for him" (181). Sutpen's musings here resemble the novel's larger pattern of speculation, as Rosa, Mr.

This "someone" in The Hamlet finds the buggy whip which either Eula Varner or Hoake McCarron lost when they were assaulted by the unnamed suitors (153).

In "Ad Astra," because of the War, this young son of the captured German aviator, who lives in Bayreuth with his mother, has never seen his father.

The young woman who has an affair and a child with Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses tells Ike that her father died while his family lived in Indianapolis. No mention is made of her mother. One of her "folks" is a child of James Beauchamp, and so descended from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, but we cannot say definitively that it was her father rather than her mother (343). (In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," the young woman and her family are not connected to the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, so her father in that story has his own entry in the database.)

The unnamed son of Moketubbe is identified as an "eight-year-old" in "The Old People" and in Go Down, Moses (202, 158) and as "Moketubbe's little son" in "A Courtship" (363). He should have grown up to succeed his father as the chief of the tribe. However, in all three texts he dies within the same sentence in which he is first mentioned and within a few days after Ikkemotubbe, his father's cousin, returns to the tribe from New Orleans with a white powder that kills at least a puppy - and probably, though none of the texts say so explicitly, this child.

In The Sound and the Fury Deacon tells Quentin that the reason he marched in the parade "on that Wop holiday" (presumably Columbus Day, 98) was to help his son-in-law "get a job on the city forces" as a "street cleaner" (98). Deacon also calls him "that son of a bitch," and implies he's very lazy (99).

In "The Bear" the narrative notes that "in April" school is always let out "so that the sons of farmers could help with the land's planting" (291).

Mr. Compson creates this profile of "a Southern lady" in Absalom, Absalom! while telling Quentin about Rosa Coldfield's behavior after her sister Ellen dies (68). According to his misogynistic generalization, the "Southern lady" is "like a vampire" in the way she will feed herself and her idea of what she is entitled to off the lives of her relatives or in-laws (68).

In his conversation with his cousin Edmonds in Part 4 of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to the "wives and daughters" of the plantation owners who fed and nursed their sick slaves both in "their stinking cabins" and, "when they were very sick," in "the big house itself" (271).

When describing the people who gather to stare at Joanna's murdered body and her burning house, the narrator of Light in August refers, briefly but very specifically, to three categories of people who are not just from the county or the "immediate neighborhood" or from town (287): one of these categories consists of "southerners who had lived for a while in the north" who, like "the poor whites" and "the casual Yankees," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).