Character Keys

The wife of Lucas Beauchamp figures in five different texts. In the first two ("A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always") she is unnamed. In the first one she speaks a thick, essentially mistrelish dialect ("Yawl and your Gawge Wilkins!" 223), in the second she is only mentioned, once.

Lucas Beauchamp appears in seven fictions, all written after 1940. In Faulkner's last published novel, The Reivers, he is only mentioned, but the brief description of him there that one white character gives another sums him up well: "except for color," Lucas "looked (and behaved: just as arrogant, just as iron-headed, just as intolerant) exactly like" Lucius the first, the patriarch of the McCaslin family who is both Lucas' grandfather and his great-grandfather (223), and whom Lucas himself claims as his birthright.

Although always a minor character, this black man reveals a lot about how Faulkner's imagination led him into and out of the haunted issue of slavery and its legacy. In his first published appearance he is "Tennie's Jim" in the hunting story "The Bear"; in that character he's a revised version of "Jimbo," one of the servants Major de Spain takes with him in "The Old People" on his annual hunting trips into the big woods.

In Go Down, Moses, Callina, or Carolina, Beauchamp is the daughter of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She dies as an infant.

Isaac McCaslin's "dead wife" is very briefly referred to in "Delta Autumn." Go Down, Moses evokes her from the start, by identifying Ike as a "widower" twice on its first page (5). His wife - who may be the daughter of the bank president who hires Ike and his partner to put a new roof on his stable - remains in the background for most of the novel, but in her brief appearances Faulkner emphasizes her hostility, as Ike meets her "tense bitter indomitable voice" with a posture of familiarity (104).

The Edmonds family descends from Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin "by the distaff" - that is, from McCaslin's daughter rather than one of his sons (5). The first Edmonds in this line may have been the man who married that daughter, or could just as easily be the man who married the daughter of that daughter - the novel provides no information about the sequence, nor any information at all about this man.

Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin.

Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their plantation be called "Warwick," as a claim on the family's purported connection to English royalty. The onstage role she plays in Go Down, Moses tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12).

Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) McCaslin is the son of Old Carothers McCaslin and the twin brother of Theophilus (Uncle Buck). He is an outstanding poker player, a good cook and housekeeper, and a less significant presence in the fiction that his brother. During the Civil War present of The Unvanquished Buddy is in Virginia fighting in Tennant's brigade after beating his brother in a card game for the privilege of serving in the Confederate regiment that was raised in Yoknapatawpha.

In Go Down, Moses, Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledgers as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child.

The wife of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the slave-owning patriarch at the head of the McCaslin, Beauchamp, Edmonds and Priest families in Faulkner's late fictions, is mentioned only once, in The Reivers. It is her Bible that Ned, the only one of her husband's illegitimate and biracial descendants who is named McCaslin rather than Beauchamp, carries in his bag - a symbolic gesture that is extremely interesting and opaque.

In Requiem for a Nun an unspecified group of Indians, identified only as "old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren," charge candy to Ratcliffe's trading post (28-29).

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.

Sometimes-Wakeup is one of Doom's two uncles in "A Justice," the brother of the Man prior to Doom, and he lives "by himself in a cabin by the creek" (349). He is apparently a recluse, whom the People only see when they take him food. After Doom murders the Man and the Man's son, Sometimes-Wakeup is next in the order of succession, though he declines to accept the position.

The Indians in "Red Leaves" - or at least the tribal chief, the Man - practice polygamy, as is clear from the reference to "Issetibbeha dying among his wives" (329). This is Issetibbeha's "newest wife" (321), not Moketubbe's mother but the woman who tells him Moketubbe has hidden the red slippers that he has always coveted. She is unwilling to sleep in the gilt bed that Issetibbeha brought back from Paris, but no other details about her are provided.

In "Red Leaves" the "son and brother" of the well-to-do family of Issetibbeha's mother presumably also has some "Negro blood," as she does (321). But his behavior links him to the upper class: after Doom gets his sister pregnant, he seeks him out "with a pistol" (318) to avenge the family's honor. Years later, however, as the "maternal uncle" of the child she bears, this brother "conducts" Doom on a trip abroad, to Paris and elsewhere in Europe (320).

At the head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish between the two generations in any way (319).

This is not the Indian named "Had-Two-Fathers" who plays a minor role in "Red Leaves." This is the character best known as Sam Fathers, though as he tells Quentin Compson in Faulkner's second Indian story, "A Justice," his Indian name was "Had-Two-Fathers" too (345). In that story he is the child of a Choctaw named Crawfish-ford and an enslaved woman whom Doom, the chief, won gambling on a Mississippi riverboat.

The Choctaw|Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe appears in fourteen texts, more than any of the other Indian characters in the fictions. His significance in most of them is either as Sam Fathers' father or as the chief who sold or traded Indian land to white settlers like Compson and Sutpen, but his own story is a fascinating one. It is first told - in two pages!

Issetibbeha is a chief of the tribe of Indians who are living in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers arrive. The Indians are called Choctaws in Faulkner's earlier fictions, and Chickasaws, the more historically appropriate name, in the later ones. Issetibbeha is identified as the son of Doom (AKA Ikkemotubbe) in the earliest 'Indian story," "Red Leaves," but later becomes Ikkemotubbe's uncle - although at one point in Go Down, Moses he is identified as "Ikkemotubbe's father old Issetibbeha" (245). He is consistently identified as the father of Moketubbe.

In both "Wash" and again in Absalom!, this girl was born on an unspecified Sunday in 1869, denied by her father and murdered by her great-grandfather on the same day.

The "daughter" of Wash Jones and the mother of Milly is not named either in the short story "Wash," were she is first mentioned (536), or in Absalom!, where she plays a somewhat more visible role, but she has her own entry as "MELICENT JONES" in the "Genealogy" at the end of the novel (308). In the novel itself, she lives with her father for some years in the "abandoned" fishing camp at Sutpen's (99). The daughter she gives birth to there is "fatherless" (139).

In Absalom!, the man who is Rosa Coldfield's "papa" and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .

In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).

Sutpen's daughter Judith first appears in the prequel to Absalom!, the short story "Wash"; though her character is barely sketched, her actions often anticipate her story in the novel. As "Miss Judith" she lives alone in the big house on the Sutpen plantation during much of the Civil War, after the deaths of her mother and brother and while her father is away fighting (541).

In Absalom! Clytemnestra (Clytie) is the daughter of Thomas Sutpen and one of the two enslaved women he brings with him to Yoknapatawpha. She is first mentioned by Rosa, as the "negro girl" with a "Sutpen face" beside Judith Sutpen, Clytie's half-sister (22); later Rosa refers to her "Sutpen coffee-colored face" (109). Sutpen "named [Clytemnestra] himself," after a legendary Greek queen, though Mr. Compson "likes to believe" that Sutpen "intended to name her Cassandra," after another figure from Greek tragedy (48).

In Absalom!, the "little boy" in the picture that is found on Charles Bon's body (75) is Bon's "sixteenth part negro son" (80); his grandiloquent name is Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon. When Judith and Clytemnestra bring him from New Orleans to Sutpen's Hundred after his mother dies, Judith tells him to "Call me Aunt Judith" (169), perhaps without realizing that he is in fact her half-nephew and her father's grandson.

In Absalom! the first wife of Thomas Sutpen and the mother of Charles Bon is not given a name until the "Genealogy" that appears after the narrative proper, where she is identified as "Eulalia Bon" (307). She is the "Haiti-born" daughter of a French sugar planter (268). When she first appears in the narrative, it is as "a shadow that almost emerged for a moment and then faded again" (199) - the elusiveness of this is entirely appropriate.

"The first Sutpen" in North America, according to Quentin's narrative in Absalom!, "probably" arrived in Jamestown on a "ship from the Old Bailey" - i.e. a ship transporting convicted criminals from London to the British colony of Virginia (180).

This is the first of the two illegitimate Sutpen children in Absalom! that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to during the family's journey across Virginia; he or she was born in "a cowshed" (183).

Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters: according to the narrative in Absalom!, "one of the sisters" altered their father's hand-me-down clothes to fit the young Thomas (185). This entry is for the "sister" who, during the family's move from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia, gives birth in "a cowshed" to an illegitimate child (183), and gets pregnant again, though "still unmarried" (181), while they are still traveling.

Thomas Sutpen comes from a large family, though Absalom! doesn't say exactly how large. He has at least two older brothers: these "two older boys" leave home "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181). This is the brother who "had been as far West as the Mississippi River one time" even before the family left the mountains (183).

As evoked in Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen's mother was "a mountain woman," "bred in the mountains," but in her case the mountains were in Scotland (195). According to Sutpen, she "never did quite learn to speak English" (195). Her husband calls her "a fine wearying woman," and it is suggested that she made him move from coastal Virginia to the mountains (180). Her death precipitates the husband's decision to return east; since there is an infant in the family when the move starts, it seems likely that she died in childbirth.

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," Lee is described in the novel as the "least talkative of them all"; his face is "a dark, saturnine mask" and his eyes are "black and restless," with "something wild and sad" lurking in them" (334). He plays almost no part in the events in the short story. Like most of the MacCallums, he is named for a prominent Confederate - Robert E. Lee.

Anse McCallum is one of Buddy McCallum's twin sons in "The Tall Men": "two absolutely identical blue-eyed youths" (49) who are mentioned together as "the twin McCallum nephews" of Rafe in "Knight's Gambit" (210). He also appears, but without any mention of his twin brother, The Town. In the first story he and his brother Lucius have identical histories. They are "wild as spikehorn bucks" as children (55). Later, they go to the agricultural college to learn how to raise whiteface cattle.

In Flags in the Dust Virginius MacCallum has two wives. Both have died before the novel takes place. The first of them was clearly a country girl of humble origins: her dowry consisted of a clock and "a dressed hog" (332). The novel does not mention anything else about her, but what it says later about the second wife - Buddy's mother, from whom he gets his coloring - suggests this wife was the mother of Virginius' five other sons: unlike Buddy, for instance, they all have "brown eyes and black hair" (354).

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Rafe, Stuart is named after the famous Confederate cavalry general, J.E.B. Stuart. He also appears in As I Lay Dying, but not as Stuart - because Samson cannot remember his first name. Like his brothers, he is a 'tall man': honorable, strong, stoic.

The eldest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family, Jackson is named for the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, under whom his father served in the Civil War. He appears as a minor character in two texts. In Flags in the Dust he is described as "a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus" (337). Much to his father's disgust, he is attempting to transform hunting by interbreeding a fox and a hound.

The youngest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family is Buddy. He first appears in Flags in the Dust as a kind of foil to Bayard Sartoris: both have served in World War I - Buddy has a combat medal to show how well he fought - but Buddy is not a member of any 'lost generation.' He returns to Yoknapatawpha, resumes his place in the yeoman family (though he doesn't display the medal, in deference to his un-reconstructed ex-Confederate father who refuses to believe his son fought in a "Yankee" army, 342), and continues his life as a countryman and avid hunter.

The only detail about Virginius MacCallum's ancestry provided in Flags in the Dust is that he received a mule from his father when he first got married. That one detail, however, makes it likely that his father also lived in Yoknapatawpha, and that he was a small farmer.

This man is the "pullman porter" mentioned in "Appendix Compson" whom Frony Gibson marries and moves to St. Louis to live with (343). He may be dead - that would be one explanation for the fact that Frony later moves to Memphis "to make a home for her mother" (343) - but the text does not say so, nor does it give him a name. It's also possible that this character is the man whom Dilsey refers to as Luster's "pappy" in The Sound and the Fury (59), though there's not enough textual evidence to establish that connection.

Frony Gibson is a member of the black family that lives on the Compson place as servants, and the daughter of Roskus and Dilsey. In The Sound and the Fury she appears in Benjy's memories as a child about the same age as Quentin and Caddy Compson, and in the last section as an adult who still lives close enough to Dilsey to walk to church with her mother on Easter Sunday. She is also Luster's mother, though the novel does not indicate if she has a husband or if, like Caddy's daughter, Luster was conceived out of wedlock.

In The Sound and the Fury Versh Gibson is the first-born son of Roskus and Dilsey. In the earliest scenes that Benjy remembers, he works as Benjy's caretaker. Sometime before his father's death he has moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis; Dilsey blames her husband for his "bad luck talk" that "got them Memphis notions into Versh" (31). He is mentioned again, briefly, in "That Evening Sun," but otherwise does not appear again in the fictions - not even in "Appendix Compson," where his mother, sister, brother and nephew are described living in Memphis in the early 1940s.

Dilsey is the matriarch of the Gibson family and the source of whatever emotional stability there is in the Compson family. A major character in The Sound and the Fury, she is married to Roskus, the mother of Versh, Frony, and T.P., and the grandmother of Luster. She is a devout Christian, a loyal servant and a very caring human being. As a character she is both related to the "mammy" stereotype and one of Faulkner's most dignified and impressive creations.

In the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, the family line begins with this man: a printer in Glasgow, Scotland, who is the father of Quentin MacLachan Compson. Apparently he died when his son was still a child (326).

The "Mrs. Compson" who appears in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished is a hard character to identify. Throughout the other four Unvanquished stories that mention "Mrs. Compson" it seems clear that she is married to General (Quentin) Compson, who is off fighting the Civil War until the final story, "Odor of Verbena," when he makes a brief appearance (245). But in "Skirmish at Sartoris," readers are told that the "only husband [Mrs.

In The Sound and the Fury Caroline Compson is the sister of Maury Bascomb (Uncle Maury), the wife of Jason Compson III, and the mother of Quentin, Candace, Jason and Maury|Benjamin. She is probably also the daughter of the woman called "Damuddy" whose death is the earliest event (and loss) in Benjy and Quentin's memories. A bed-ridden neurotic and a hypochondriac, Caroline seems hopelessly preoccupied with herself. She is obsessed with the social standing of the Bascomb family and largely oblivious to the misery of her own.

Benjy Compson is one of the most original characters in American literature. To Mrs. Compson, who originally named him Maury in honor of her brother, Benjy's severe mental handicap is shameful, and a reason to change his name to Benjamin - apparently on her son Quentin's suggestion, though tellingly he gets the Biblical significance of the name Benjamin wrong.

Speaking outside the pages of his art, Faulkner called Caddy Compson his "heart's darling," and The Sound and the Fury his attempt to draw her "picture." It's a very modern portrait, however, defined by her absence everywhere in the novel except in the minds of her three brothers, each of whom attempts to fill the absences at the center of his own life with what he tries to make her represent or (to use the term that is both there and absent in the novel's Shakespearean title) to 'signify.' On her own terms, Caddy almost too good to be believable.