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257 Thomas Sutpen's Sister 2

Based on the phrase "one of the sisters" in Absalom!, we can say that Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters (185). This entry is not the sister who gets pregnant, twice, during the family's trip from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia.

254 Unnamed Step-Father of Had-Two-Fathers

In both the 1940 magazine version of "The Old People" and the revised version of it that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, the step-father of Had-Two-Fathers is "one of the slaves which [Doom] inherited" from Moketubbe (the story, 203). After impregnating a slave woman from New Orleans, Doom "pronounces a marriage" between her and "one of the slave men he has just inherited" upon becoming "The Man" (the novel, 158). But this man's place on the family tree is ambiguous.

255 Unnamed Son of Ikkemotubbe

This character is one of the more elusive in Faulkner's fiction. The Harpers Magazine version of "The Old People" creates an ambiguity when it says that "almost a hundred years ago" Ikkemotubbe sold "his own son" to a white planter, the great-grandfather of the narrator on whose farm Sam lived for most of his life (203). Since Sam is "seventy" years old (202), he could not be this man, and would have to be this man's son.

253 Unnamed Grandmother of Boon Hogganbeck

Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).

252 Boon Hogganbeck

The character of Boon Hogganbeck is essentially the same in all seven of his appearances in the fiction, though in one of them ("The Bear") his name is Hoggenbeck, and his lineage changes in another. In every text he has an Indian grandmother, but when he first appears, in "Lion," she is a "Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land" (184). Beginning with his next appearance, in "The Old People," Faulkner lowers her rank: Boon's blood, the narrator says, "is not a chief's blood" (203).

250 Unnamed Cousin of Doom

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving, neither the chief of the tribe (The Man) nor his son are named. In the patriarchal society Faulkner imagines, this son is heir to the title The Man - and as the son of The Man's sister, his cousin Doom is out of the line of succession. In "Red Leaves" both The Man and his son die mysteriously after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans. In "A Justice" Doom's responsibility for their deaths is made explicit.

249 Unnamed Uncle of Doom

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in its early history, he does not name the man who is "The Man," the hereditary chief of the tribe. His sister is the mother of Doom. In "Red Leaves," The Man and his son both die shortly after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans - presumably at Doom's hands, but that part of the story is left untold here.

248 Admiral Dewey Snopes

Ad - Admiral Dewey Snopes - is one of Eck Snopes' children. He was named after a hero of the Spanish-American War.

247 Mrs. Wallstreet Panic Snopes

Although the wife of Wallstreet Panic Snopes is never named in The Town, she is memorably characterized. When she first appears at school in Jefferson, the teacher, Miss Vaiden Wyott, instructs Wall that "this is she. Marry her." He does. His wife is described as a "tense fierce not quite plain-faced girl . . . and a will if anything even more furious" than Gavin's in opposing the rest of the Snopeses (154).

246 Wallstreet Panic Snopes

Wallstreet Panic Snopes - given his absurd name absurdly, in the hopes that it might mean he'll get rich, but more often called "Wall" in the fictions - is a very young "little periwinkle-eyed boy" when he first appears in The Hamlet (304). He appears in all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy, and his eyes are still "an incredible tender youthful periwinkle blue" at the end of The Mansion (461).

245 Eckrum Snopes

Eck Snopes is one of Flem's cousins, though the narrator of "Spotted Horses," the first text in which Eck appears, tells us that "Flem would skin Eck quick as he would ere a one of us" (168) - and in the story he does. Eck acquires two of the Texas ponies, but loses both of them the same day; he even manages, in his hapless attempt to catch one of them, to break its neck. In the Snopes trilogy he fails again, and again, as a blacksmith, a mill worker, a restaurant cook and a watchman, but his failures are all admirable.

244 Launcelot|Lump Snopes

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218).

243 Virgil Snopes

The biography of Virgil Snopes is one of the more unusual, even among the various Snopeses. When he first appears, in Sanctuary, he provides an occasion for comedy rather than alarm, as a sexually very naive young man who, on his first trip to the big city of Memphis, mistakes a brothel for a boarding house, and the prostitutes for the surprisingly large family of the landlady, Miss Reba. His friend and fellow babe-in-the-wood Fonzo takes him to another brothel, but afterwards Virgil complains about having to pay three dollars for something "you caint tote off with you" (196).

242 Youngest Child of Byron Snopes

When Byron Snopes's four children step off the train in Jefferson, Chick describes the youngest as "a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man's shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent" (378). He never indicates the sex of this child, perhaps because he cannot determine it himself - or perhaps to emphasize the strangeness of the four as a group. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

241 Son of Byron Snopes 2

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

240 Son of Byron Snopes 1

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

239 Byron Snopes' Daughter

Byron Snopes has four children - probably all illegitimate, legally - with a Jicarilla Apache in New Mexico. According to Charles Mallison's narrative in The Town, "the tallest was a girl though we never did know whether she was the oldest or just the tallest" (378); like her brothers, she is wearing overalls when she arrives in Jefferson. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

238 Unnamed Jicarilla Apache Squaw

This "Jicarilla squaw" from "Old Mexico" is the mother of "Byron Snopes's children" (379), the four sinister kids who appear at the end of The Town and then, as soon as Yoknapatawpha realizes how dangerous they are, are sent back into the west. She is mentioned, barely, in The Mansion, but nothing more can be said about her.

237 Doris Snopes

Doris Snopes is the youngest brother of of Clarence Snopes. He "resembles Clarence not only in size and shape but [has] the same mentality of a child and the moral principles of a wolverine" (327). He appears only in The Mansion.

236 Vardaman Snopes

Vardaman (and his twin brother Bilbo) are minor figures in The Town and The Hamlet, one of the three (or four, in the second novel) sons of I.O. Snopes and his second wife. Also like Bilbo, he is named for one of the segregationist politicians in modern Mississippi politics, in his case for James K. Vardaman, a very outspoken white supremacist who served as both a Governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.

235 Bilbo Snopes

Bilbo is a minor figure in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. In The Town he is the son of I.O. Snopes and his second wife and the twin to Vardaman Snopes. Not even that much is made clear when he is briefly mentioned inThe Mansion. He is named after Theodore G. Bilbo, a Mississippi Governor and U.S. Senator who was a staunch defender of white supremacy.

234 Clarence Snopes

On the Snopes family tree, Clarence - according to The Mansion, it's "pronounced 'Cla'nce'" (325) - is the son of I.O. and the half-brother of Montgomery Ward Snopes. He is one of the four Snopes named in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, but appears only as the boy whose "hulking but catlike presence" makes Bryon Snopes nervous (235). It is in Sanctuary that his character as one of the most venal Snopeses emerges.

233 Montgomery Ward Snopes

Montgomery Ward was named for a national retailer (Montgomery Ward) that specialized in selling by mail to rural customers. The son of I.O. and his first wife, he is among the first Snopeses Faulkner ever created. He doesn't appear in Flags in the Dust but is mentioned there when Horace Benbow's neighbor asks him about "your Snopes" (166). After faking a heart condition to evade the draft, Monty had accompanied Horace Benbow to World War I as a non-combatant working with the Y.M.C.A.

232 Saint Elmo Snopes

As a child, a hulking and "bear-shaped" figure, Saint Elmo eats all of the candy in Varner's case (350). A son of I.O. Snopes from his first marriage, he appears only in The Hamlet. (The names of the various Snopeses come from a variety of sources; Saint Elmo's name comes from the title of an 1866 novel by Georgia author Augusta Jane Evans.)

231 Mrs. I.O. Snopes 2

Faulkner's decision in The Town to make I.O. Snopes a bigamist complicates the identity of the various characters who appear as his wife. The first such character appears in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, as a "placid mountain of a woman" who spends her days in the porch swing of their "small frame house" - "not doing anything: just swinging" (235). Her son is named Clarence.

230 Mrs. I.O. Snopes 1

In The Hamlet I.O. Snopes calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that she is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a twice-married man, i.e. a bigamist.

229 I.O. Snopes

I.O. Snopes' career as a character begins with the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, and after six more appearances ends three decades later in The Mansion. In those eight texts his various jobs include restaurant manager, cotton speculator, mule trader, blacksmith and schoolteacher. In all of these contexts he is both comically out of place and nonetheless vaguely alarming - and impossible to get into a single focus, as Faulkner re-invents him more than once.

228 Wesley Snopes

Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43).

227 Byron Snopes

Although Flem, Montgomery Ward, I.O. and Clarence are mentioned in Flags in the Dust, in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction Byron is the first Snopes whom Faulkner develops into a character. Many Snopeses are named for famous men or products in American culture (vide "Montgomery Ward"). 'Byron Societies' were bourgeois reading groups in the U.S. about the time Byron Snopes would have been born - there is even a "Byron Club" in Jefferson in The Town (325) - but it's hard to imagine Byron's parents (revealed in the Snopes trilogy to be I.O.

226 Melisandre Backus Stevens

Although through most of the 1930s and 1940s Gavin Stevens looks like a confirmed bachelor, in four late fictions Faulkner decided to add love and marriage to his biography. The woman he marries was born Melisandre Backus, the descendant of the Melisandre who married a Backus in the middle of the Civil War ("My Grandmother Millard") and more immediately the only child of a Yoknapatawpha plantation owner. By the time she marries Gavin, she is the widow of a New Orleans gangster and the mother of two children.

225 Temple and Gowan's Daughter

When Requiem for a Nun begins, the baby daughter of Gowan and Temple Drake Stevens has been murdered by Nancy.

224 Bucky Stevens

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).

223 Temple Drake Stevens

As Temple Drake, she is the principal character in Sanctuary (1931); as Temple Drake Stevens, she is at the center of the dramatic portions of Requiem for a Nun. She is (as she says frequently in the first novel) the daughter of a judge, a member of an aristocratic family, and a very complex young woman. In the first novel she is a seventeen-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the heir to southern traditions trying on the contemporary role of flapper.

222 First Yoknapatawpha Stevens

There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.

221 Herbert Head

In The Sound and the Fury Herbert Head, whom Mrs. Compson calls "my Harvard boy" (93), is a banker from South Bend, Indiana. He and the already-pregnant Caddy meet in the fashionable resort of French Lick; in April 1910 they marry after Herbert promises Jason a job in the family bank, and tries to bribe Quentin to keep secret his expulsion from Harvard for cheating. The marriage does not last a year: when he discovers Caddy's pregnancy, Herbert disowns her and her child.

220 Maggie Dandridge Stevens

The mother of Gavin and Maggie - Mrs. Lemuel Stevens, nee Maggie Dandridge - doesn't appear in person in the fictions, but various items associated with her do. In Intruder in the Dust the hat Eunice Habersham wears reminds her grandson Chick Mallison of her; it's a "round faintly dusty-looked black hat set squarely on the top of her head" (73); on both women, this looks "exactly right" (127). In "Knight's Gambit" Chick thinks of the books in his family's house as "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149).

219 Charles Mallison II

Charles Mallison Jr. appears in nine texts, in all but one of them mainly as narrator, especially of the exploits and misadventures of the man he refers to hundreds of times, usually in an admiring tone, as "Uncle Gavin." Gavin is Gavin Stevens, and his nephew is thus a member of one of the older upper class families in Yoknapatawpha, the only child of Gavin's twin sister Maggie Stevens Mallison. Faulkner creates Charles ("Chick," as Gavin calls him once in "Tomorrow," the first time he's given any name) to serve as a kind of Dr.

218 Charles Mallison I

Although he is mentioned in three short stories and actually appears in three novels, the father of Charles Mallison, Jr., remains an elusive character. He is dead in the first story that mentions him ("An Error in Chemistry") and almost irrelevant even in the texts where he appears: Intruder in the Dust, The Town and The Mansion. His wife, Maggie Stevens by birth and Gavin's twin sister, sometimes calls him Charley, and according to The Town he owns the livery stable in Jefferson (at a time when cars are displacing horses).

217 Maggie Stevens Mallison

Margaret (Maggie) Mallison is Judge Stevens' daughter, Gavin's twin sister, Charles Mallison's wife and Chick's mother. The role she plays in the six late fictions in which she appears or is mentioned is largely defined by her relationship to these male figures, especially to her son, toward whom she is unfailingly protective despite his own restiveness with her concerns. She is well-educated, within the limits defined by her gender and her caste: she attended the Jefferson Female Academy, where she met and became friends with the woman whom Gavin would eventually marry.

216 Gavin Stevens

Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.

215 Gowan Stevens' Father

Mentioned only in The Town, the man who is the father of Gowan Stevens works for the U.S. State Department. When he is assigned to "China or India or some far place" (3), he sends his son to Jefferson to stay with his Stevens cousins.

214 Gowan Stevens' Grandfather

We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.

213 Gowan Stevens

The Stevenses are an old Jefferson family that becomes a very big part of the story of Yoknapatawpha by way of Faulkner's fondness for Gavin. The first member of the family to appear in the fictions is "Judge Stevens" in "A Rose for Emily," but in Sanctuary Gavin's second cousin Gowan becomes the first Stevens to play a significant role. And in Sanctuary Faulkner's treatment of Gowan is scathing. He's a recent graduate of the University of Virginia who likes to claim that he learned there both how to hold his liquor and how to be a gentleman.

212 Gowan Stevens' Mother

Gowan Stevens' mother never appears in person, but three Yoknapatawpha fictions mention her. If we re-arrange their order of publication as the sequence of events in her biography, her youngest mention occurs in The Town, where she accompanies her husband for the duration of his State Department assignment to "some far place" - which explains why she sends her son Gowan from Washington to Jefferson (3).

211 Lemuel Stevens

Lemuel Stevens - usually Judge Stevens, but "Captain Stevens" in "Tomorrow" (96) - is the father of Gavin, and probably, although scholars disagree about this, the son of another man named Judge Stevens. He appears or is mentioned in 7 different texts. We see him in his role as a judge, but the military title is confusing, since there is no evidence that any of the Stevens family serve in either the U.S. or the Confederate armies.

210 Mother of Lucius Priest I

In The Reivers "Grandfather's mother" is mentioned twice: when Lucius Priest assumes that she taught her son to "make his manners" to a lady in the same way that the males in the family always do (200); and when Lucius notes that his Grandfather, "an only child," stayed with his mother in Carolina while his father was away fighting during the Civil War (285). She died in 1864.

209 Father of Lucius Priest I

In The Reivers Lucius briefly describes his Grandfather's father as a Confederate "color sergeant" who was shot and killed during the fighting in Virginia in 1862 (285). The fact that he was a sergeant rather than a commissioned officer complicates the question of the family's class status. When, for example, Lucius earlier discusses how his great-grandmother, this man's wife, taught his grandfather how to behave as a gentleman, it seems to imply an upper class background (cf.

208 Delphine McCaslin

In The Reivers Delphine is the cook in Grandfather Priest's house and the fourth and current wife of Ned McCaslin (31).

206 Carothers McCaslin's Father

This is one of the characters in Go Down, Moses who only appear in the ledgers of the McCaslin plantation. There the entry for "Roskus" and "Fibby," written by Ike's father Buck McCaslin, mentions that Roskus was "rased by Granfather in Callina," and that Fibby was "bought by granfather in Callina" (252). This Carolina ancestor, the father of "Old Carothers" McCaslin and so the great-grandfather of Ike, is not mentioned any where else in the novel.

205 Samuel Beauchamp's Mother

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that name in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's unnamed mother was the oldest daughter of Lucas and Mollie Beauchamp; she dies while giving birth to him. In "A Point of Law," Lucas and Molly Beauchamp have at least one child besides Nat; we are assuming this child is the daughter who gives birth to Samuel, though the story's only reference to her is ambiguous. According to the narrator, it is known that Lucas has "one daughter with grandchildren" (214).

204 Theophilus McCaslin 2

In the short story "Lion" Theophilus McCaslin is the grandson of Uncle Ike McCaslin, and a member of the hunting party. (This character never appears in any other story, but later Faulkner uses the name "Theophilus McCaslin" for Ike's father. Those later texts also say that Ike never has any children.)

203 Mrs. Buddy McCallum

Buddy McCallum's dead wife in "The Tall Men" - the mother of the twins Lucius and Anse - is only mentioned briefly, in connection with her absence from the McCallum family graveyard where the story ends. Like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, she "wanted to be buried with her folks" (60). According to Gombault, "she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

202 Belle Mitchell Benbow

In Flags in the Dust Belle is Harry Mitchell's wife and Horace Benbow's lover for most of the novel, though she is Mrs. Benbow at the end. With Harry she has a daughter, Little Belle. Her hair is described as a "rich bloody auburn" (199), and her personality in equally vivid if pejorative terms: "her eyes are like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent" (182). "Smoldering" is recurrent adjective for her (201, 203, etc.). Unlike the aristocratic Benbows, she is very much a citizen of the New South.

201 Colonel John Sartoris' Father

In "There Was a Queen," Elnora refers to Miss Jenny's "paw" as having been killed by the Yankees during the Civil War (732). She doesn't say any more about him, and he is not even mentioned in any other texts, but the larger story of the Sartoris family as Faulkner tells it elsewhere, especially in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished, suggests that this man owned a slave plantation in one of the Carolinas - and that the family's "Cal-lina house" was a mansion before the Yankees burned it down (732).

200 Sartoris Womenfolks

Other than Colonel John, the only Sartorises referred to in Absalom! are "Sartoris' womenfolks," who use their "silk dresses" to sew the regimental flag that Yoknapatawpha's Confederate volunteers carry to the Civil War (63).

199 Mink Snopes' Mother

In The Mansion Mink Snopes's mother died before he got to know her - or even what she called him.

198 Mink Snopes' Father

The brief description of Mink's father in The Hamlet could make him seem sympathetic: he's a lifelong sharecropper who "moved from farm to farm, without himself having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them" (261).

197 Mink Snopes' Daughter 2

This is the younger of Mink and Yetti's two "towheaded" daughters who are briefly mentioned in The Hamlet (81) and The Mansion. They are two years apart in age, but the first novel does not distinguish between them. The second does: unlike the older sister, this "younger daughter" becomes "the madam" of a Memphis whorehouse (320) - though that detail is mentioned only when the narrative notes that Mink unknowingly walks past the place on his way to buy a pistol.

196 Mink Snopes' Daughter 1

In The Hamlet Mink and his wife have two "towheaded" daughters (81), born two years apart (264). This is the older one, though the novel does not distinguish between them when it depicts them, for example, hiding behind their mother's "skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world" (82). They were conceived two years apart, in the first five years of their parents' marriage (264). In The Mansion, the "two daughters" are mentioned, briefly; this older one disappears after her father goes to prison and her mother dies (10).

195 Yettie Snopes

Mink Snopes' wife - given a first name, Yettie, in The Mansion, the second and last fiction in which she appears - plays a small part in the large saga of the Yoknapatawpha Snopeses, but has a very powerful backstory, as it's described in The Hamlet. Mink met during his travels, when after seeing her "standing in the savage lamp-light . . . in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp" (243-44), he called a halt to his travels and took a job at the camp. Her mother died in giving birth to her.

194 Linda Snopes Kohl

Linda's character comes into focus slowly but steadily across three decades and six fictions. In the first of those, Flags in the Dust, as Flem Snopes' "baby" she is not named nor even gendered. In the next, she still has no name or gender but Suratt, the narrator of "Spotted Horses," sees her clearly enough to call her "as well-growed a three-months-old baby as we ever see" (167) - implicitly suggesting she was conceived out of wedlock, and that Flem might not be her father.

193 Hoake|Hoke McCarron

Whether as Hoake (as his name is spelled in The Hamlet) or Hoke (as it's spelled in The Town and The Mansion), McCarron plays a biologically crucial role in the Snopes trilogy as the father of Linda Snopes, daughter of Eula and, ostensibly, Flem. His character is not attractive - except to Eula - in the first novel. He is an outsider to Yoknapatawpha, the son of substantial property owners, "a little swaggering and definitely spoiled though not vain so much as intolerant" (150).

190 Eula Varner Snopes

Eula is mentioned in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel (1929) and two short stories from the 1930s. She's simply Flem's "wife" in Flags in the Dust (166). The stories, however, introduce the character trait that will dominate her portrayal in the Snopes trilogy: her sexual attractiveness. As the youngest daughter of Will and Maggie Varner in "Spotted Horses" she's a "big, soft-looking" girl whom suitors swarm around "like bees around a honey pot" (166).

192 Maggie Varner

Mrs. Will Varner, Maggie Varner in The Hamlet, figures in four of the fictions (compared to her husband's ten). She is mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the unnamed wife of "Uncle Billy," as Will is called there, specifically in connection with the birth of her first child, Jody. The next time she is appears, in The Hamlet, she is the mother of sixteen children, eleven of whom still live, though only two of them are important in the novel: Jody and his sister Eula.

191 Will Varner

Will Varner appears or is mentioned in ten different texts, as "Uncle Billy" in the first two and as "Will" in all but one of the others (in "Centaur in Brass" he is the unnamed father of Flem Snopes' wife). In those first two - As I Lay Dying and "Spotted Horses" - he is a farmer and veterinarian who (in the absence of a real doctor) sets the broken legs of two different human critters. But in the other texts he makes a much more commanding figure as "the principal landowner" in Frenchman's Bend, to quote from his third text, "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (136).

189 Isaac Snopes

Appearing only in The Hamlet, Isaac "Ike" Snopes is the cognitively limited cousin of Flem and Mink. At 14, he is a "hulking figure" in "bursting overalls" (94) who works around Mrs. Littlejohn's hotel as a kind of janitor. Ike is referred to as an "idiot" and "creature" with a "mowing and bobbing head" and a "Gorgon-face" that "had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair" (95). Officially, Flem is Ike's guardian, but he does nothing to protect Ike from being exploited by Lump Snopes.

188 Mink Snopes

One of Flem's closest relations - on the tangled Snopes family tree they share a common grandmother - Mink is described in The Mansion as a "small frail creature, not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy" (55). Inside that body, however, he carries around enough rage to claim two men's lives. He first appears in The Hamlet when Faulkner decides to adapt his earlier short story "The Hound" into the saga of the Snopeses.

187 Colonel Sartoris Snopes

Ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes is the focal character in "Barn Burning." The youngest of sharecropper Abner Snopes' four children, he is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud" (4).

186 Snopes, Twin Sister of Net

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure.

185 Net Snopes

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt.

184 Flem Snopes

In the beginning was Flem Snopes. He is the very first character who appears in the very first fiction about Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner sat down to write. He is the "Father Abraham" in the title of that unfinished text, which was going to tell the story of Flem's rise from tenant farmer's son in Frenchman's Bend to bank president in Jefferson, from a sharecropper's cabin to The Mansion - as the final volume of the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner finished over three decades later is titled.

183 Lennie Snopes

Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).

182 Vynie Snopes

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished the woman who opens the door of Ab Snopes' cabin to Bayard and Ringo is presumably his wife - at least, our database makes that presumption. She tries to throw them off the track by telling them that "Mr. Snopes" has gone to Alabama (101, 162). In The Hamlet Ab has two wives. This first one is named Vynie.

181 Ab Snopes

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.

180 Flem Snopes' Grandfather

In The Town Flem tells a furniture store owner in Memphis that he had a grandfather, "because everybody had," adding that he never knew his, but "whoever he was he never owned enough furniture for a room" (233). In The Mansion Mink tells the warden of the penitentiary that his and Flem's "grandpaw had two sets of chillen" (114). Those are the only references in the canon to this ur-Snopes, but from them we can infer that he was poor and married twice. From the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group we know that he and his wives had a lot of children.

179 Flem Snopes' Grandmother

In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.

178 Bobo Beauchamp

In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning).

177 Ned McCaslin

Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives).

176 Unnamed Mother of Ned McCaslin

In The Reivers, the unnamed mother of Ned McCaslin is "the natural [i.e. illegitimate] daughter" of Lucius McCaslin and one of his female slaves (31). In Go Down, Moses the slave with whom McCaslin has a daughter is named Eunice, and their daughter is Tomasina; from her descends the Beauchamp side of the McCaslin family. These Beauchamps are a major part of the earlier novel's story, and some of them re-appear in The Reivers.

174 Lucius Priest III

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.

173 Lucius Priest II's Son

The narrator of The Reivers, Lucius Priest, at one point mentions "your father" to his grandson, the person to whom he is telling the story (25). From that one reference we can't say definitively if this "father" is the narrator's son - or son-in-law. But if we assume that his grandson bears both Lucius' names (i.e. is a Priest), then it follows that he is a son. The reference to this "father" occurs in connection with the period of "the mid-thirties" in Jefferson (25).

172 Roth Edmonds' Child

The end of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family line in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making their child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter.

171 Alexander Priest

In The Reivers Alexander is the youngest of Lucius Priest's three brothers, and still in diapers. His birth just before or during "last winter" is mentioned in the text (44).

170 Maury Priest II

The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).

169 Lessep Priest

The oldest of Lucius Priest's younger brothers in The Reivers is named Lessep, his mother's maiden name. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than seven years old (56).

168 Lucius Priest II

Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.

165 Carothers Roth Edmonds

The great-great-great-grandson of Carothers McCaslin, the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin after whom he is named, Carothers (Roth) Edmonds is the last owner of the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation in the fictions, the white landlord of the Negro tenant farmers who work the fields that he owns. Among those tenants is his 'black' relative, Lucas Beauchamp, the grandson of Old Carothers. In Go Down, Moses and the stories the precede it - "A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always" - the relationship between Roth and Lucas is mainly an occasion for comedy.

167 Alison Lessep Priest

The most vivid detail that Lucius Priest, the narrator of The Reivers, provides about his mother, Alison, is her love for riding in her father-in-law's automobile: she sits in the back seat with her children, her "face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's" (41). She is resourceful enough to "invent a kind of shield" to keep them all safe whenever Grandfather discharges the tobacco he chews (41).

166 Louisa Edmonds

In Go Down, Moses Zack Edmonds' unnamed wife dies giving birth to their son Roth; that would be around 1898. In The Reivers "Cousin Louisa" is the woman at the McCaslin-Edmonds place who takes care of Lucius' siblings when his parents go to Bay St. Louis (48). Although that happens in 1905, Louisa is probably Zack's wife, though Faulkner may have instead decided to give Zack a sister named Louisa.

164 Samuel Worsham Beauchamp

In "Go Down, Moses," and again in the chapter with that title in the novel Go Down, Moses - the only texts he appears in - Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (256, 351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

163 Unnamed Granddaughter of James Beauchamp

The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child in Go Down, Moses is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" makes Ike realize that she is a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North.

162 Maury Priest I

Like William Faulkner's father Murry in real life, Lucius' father Maury Priest owns a livery stable. In the first chapter of The Reivers, Maury displays considerable force of character when he handles the trouble caused by Boon's rash anger. And the "gentlemanly" way he treats even his black employees is worth noting (8). But after that he becomes almost invisible, even before departing with the rest of the adults in the family for Bay St. Louis.

161 Zachary Edmonds

Zachary Edmonds is the son of Cass and Alice, the father of Roth, and the great-great-grandson (on the "distaff" side) of the patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, from whom the Edmondses inherit the big plantation which Zack runs during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Go Down, Moses stories he is characterized mainly through his relationship to the Negro tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp - who is also his cousin. Like Bayard Sartoris and Ringo, the white and black boys grow up together, living "almost as brothers lived" (54).

160 George Wilkins

Like Lucas Beauchamp, George Wilkins is a tenant farmer on the Edmonds plantation who is at times Lucas' rival and at others his assistant; he is also Lucas' son-in-law, though the time at which that happens is hard to pin down. He appears first in "A Point of Law," as competition for Lucas' moonshine business; Lucas' attempt to foil him lands them both in essentially comic trouble with the law. Their get-out-of-jail card is the (possibly forged) certificate of marriage between him and Lucas' daughter Nat.

159 Nat Beauchamp Wilkins

Lucas and Molly's daughter Nat is described in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses as "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She struggles against her domineering father and with her lazy husband, determined to get what she deserves. Despite her shrewdness as a bargainer, she can't ultimately overcome her circumstances.

157 Henry Beauchamp

Henry Beauchamp is the oldest child of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses. He is raised alongside Roth Edmonds as the white child's "black foster-brother" (106), just as his father was raised alongside Roth’s father, Zack. When Roth, however, insists on drawing the color line between them, the seven-year-old Henry accepts the new terms of their relationship, but tells Roth, "peacefully," that "I aint shamed of nobody . . . Not even me" (110).

156 Unnamed Son of James Beauchamp's Son

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.)

155 Lucius Quintus Priest I

In The Reivers, his last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).

154 Alice Edmonds

Alice is the wife of McCaslin (Cass) Edmonds and the mother of Zack Edmonds. She is mentioned only once in Go Down, Moses: "[Cass'] wife Alice had taught Fonsiba to read and write too a little" (263). (However, in the earlier chapter titled "The Fire and the Hearth," the narrative claims that it was Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, who taught the Beauchamp children to read, 106.)

153 Sarah Edmonds Priest

Lucius' paternal Grandmother in The Reivers is an Edmonds by birth, which accounts for the fact that the Priests belong to the "cadet branch" of the McCaslin-Edmonds family (17). Married at fifteen, she is now "just past fifty" (41). While afraid at first of the family's new car, she soon learns to enjoy riding in it - until the first (and last) time the wind blows her husband's expectorated tobacco juice into her face.

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