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2009 Unnamed Wing Commander

After Sartoris' trick in "All the Dead Pilots," "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, Wing Commanders were in charge of multiple squadroons. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, himself a brigadier general in a different branch of the British military.

2524 Unnamed Witness 1

The older of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a man of about forty" (72); his dialect - "Him and Joe" (67), "Yonder's his boat" (69) - indicates that, like most of the story's characters, he's a "country-bred man" (78).

2525 Unnamed Witness 2

The younger of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a youth, less than twenty, by his face" (67). He tells Stevens that, after the discovery, he "won't never eat another" fish (74).

2507 Unnamed Witnesses

In "Monk," several unnamed people find Monk standing over the body at the gas station and detain him until the authorities arrive.

2029 Unnamed Wives and Children

In "All the Dead Pilots" these are the women who married the aviators who survived the First World War and the children who were born to them in "suburban homes almost paid out" (512).

3711 Unnamed Wives of Ned McCaslin

In The Reivers Lucius notes in passing that Delphine is the wife Ned has in 1904, and that during his lifetime he "ran through four wives" (31). This entry represents the other three, none of whom are given names, or individualized in any way. The narrative doesn't even indicate Delphine's place in the sequence of four.

2468 Unnamed Wives or Mistresses of Southern Soldiers

In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.

1292 Unnamed Woman at Card Party

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, this woman is a member of the same social club as the deputy's wife. She insists on a "recount of the scores" of the card game that the wife thought she had won (252, 147).

2215 Unnamed Woman at Farm House

In Light in August this "gaunt, leatherhard woman" recognizes Joe Christmas when he comes to her door for food; when he asks "what day this is," she tells him it is Tuesday, and threatens to call her man if he doesn't go away (332).

717 Unnamed Woman in Alabama

In "Vendee" and then again in The Unvanquished, this "woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth" (102, 164) is a victim of Grumby and his men. Bayard vividly describes her voice as she describes the gang; it sounds "light and far away like a locust from across a pasture" (102, 164).

1923 Unnamed Woman in Alley

In Sanctuary Ruby tells Temple that she once gave away a fur coat "to a woman in an alley" (62). Ruby lived in many different places, so there's no way to tell what city the alley might be in - and the text provides no other information about the woman at all.

3068 Unnamed Woman in Car

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

1621 Unnamed Woman in Chicago Nightclub 1

This young woman in Flags in the Dust is described as "a slim, long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes" (384). She is Bayard's companion at the Chicago night club where he agrees to fly the experimental plane; her mouth may be bold, but she says she is afraid of him: "He'll do anything" (386).

1622 Unnamed Woman in Chicago Nightclub 2

In Flags in the Dust this young woman wears an expression of "harried desperation" as she sits with Harry Mitchell at the Chicago nightclub. It seems that after getting Harry drunk, she steals his diamond tiepin; when the waiter apparently tries to stop her, her voice rises "with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream" (388).

1745 Unnamed Woman in Doorway

In The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin looks around after Shreve pumps water on his face, he sees a "woman cross the door" of a nearby house, "but she didn't look out" (165).

2926 Unnamed Woman in Frenchman's Bend 1

In Intruder in the Dust this woman started a feud over a "church bazaar" baking prize with "another lady" in Frenchman's Bend (227). When she reported that the other woman's husband was making and selling whiskey, Sheriff Hampton had to intervene. As these details suggest, the narrative uses the title "Frenchman's Bend lady" sarcastically (227).

2927 Unnamed Woman in Frenchman's Bend 2

Referred to as "another lady" in Intruder in the Dust this woman angers another woman in Frenchman's Bend, apparently by winning a baking competition (227). Her husband is locally well-known and -patronized as a maker of moonshine whiskey. The narrative's use of "lady" is clearly sarcastic.

1924 Unnamed Woman in Grotto Club

While Temple is in the "washroom" of the Grotto club in Sanctuary, she and another woman "examine one another's clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances" (233).

718 Unnamed Woman in Mississippi

In "Raid" and then again in The Unvanquished, this woman informs Rosa Millard that she and her party have entered Mississippi.

1626 Unnamed Woman in Mount Vernon

This "young woman" is only mentioned once in Flags in the Dust, as the person with whom Lee MacCallum is "keeping company" (i.e. courting, 350).

1925 Unnamed Woman in Red Dress

Among the people attending Red's funeral in Sanctuary, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.

2642 Unnamed Woman Who Shot McCarron

In The Hamlet, a few days after Hoake McCarron's father is "shot in a gambling house," a rumor arises that "a woman had shot him" (150). No evidence is given to support the rumor, but if it's true, then the context makes it likely that she is a prostitute.

720 Unnamed Women and Negroes

"The Unvanquished" - both the story and the novel with that title - includes an unusual reference to "white women" and "Negroes" (149, 93). The text brings these two groups together as the people in Yoknapatawpha who are equally threatened by the existence of Grumby's gang of "Independents" - though the "white women" are "frightened" while the Negroes are "tortured" (149, 93), and that it's hard to see what place Negro women occupy in this phrasing.

1618 Unnamed Women College Students 1

These are the young women in Flags in the Dust who are in college in the neighboring town (obviously Oxford) whom Young Bayard (along with Mitch and Suratt and three Negro musicians) serenades. They are only seen as shapes leaning out of the windows of the co-ed dorm, "aureoled against the lighted rooms behind," "feminine and delicately and divinely young" (143).

1619 Unnamed Women College Students 2

Lying in the dark at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary, Temple remembers being in her dorm in college, talking with other women students as they all dressed for a dance. One of them is accused by the others of knowing too much about sex and another, "the youngest one," is made sick by the conversation (152).

1620 Unnamed Women College Students 3

On the train that Horace takes to Oxford in Sanctuary he sees "two girls with painted small faces and scant bright dresses" (169).

2030 Unnamed Women during War

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" displays considerable sympathy for the impact of war on women who remain at home while the men in their lives are at the front, going so far as to say that they "died" on the day war was declared (514). This group includes the "mothers and sweethearts" to whom the soldiers write letters from the war (512), and the "three day wives and three-year widows" whom the soldiers marry hastily on their way to the war (514).

2966 Unnamed Women in Civil War Jefferson

According to Intruder in the Dust, old houses like Miss Habersham's "still seem to be spellbound by the shades of women, old women still spinsters and widows waiting . . . waiting for the slow telegraph to bring them news of Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania battles" (117).

2069 Unnamed Women in Jefferson 1

In both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, these women help Mrs. Armstid cope with her circumstances by giving her materials - "string saved from packages and bits of cloth" to weave into "fancy objects" she can sell ("Lizards," 142) . In The Hamlet Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" (360).

1467 Unnamed Women in Jefferson 2

In The Unvanquished, when Bayard first rides into town on his way to confront Redmond, these "women" are the only people he sees on the street, he assumes because it was "long past breakfast and not yet noon" (245). These women recognize Bayard and "stopped sudden and dead" when they realize his potentially fatal errand (245).

3614 Unnamed Women in Pascagoula

The female clientele at the "joint" where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion would be more surprised by an ear trumpet than a "G string" (275). They are presumably, like Linda, women who work in the shipyard because the male population has gone to fight in the war; the reference to the "G string" as well as the noise in the "joint" is the narrative's way of implying how non-traditional, by the standards of southern gentility, is their behavior and appearance.

3807 Unnamed Women Married by J.P.s

In the middle of describing Sutpen and Ellen's wedding in Absalom, Absalom! Mr. Compson interrupts his reconstruction to generalize about women who never had formal weddings: "women who were married by tobacco-chewing j[ustices of the] p[eace]s in country courthouses or by ministers waked after midnight" (37). According to his misogynistic assertion, it is the longing of these women for a more ceremonial wedding that is the cause of "most divorces" (37).

3205 Unnamed Women of Jackson

The "Jackson women" who in Requiem for a Nun sponsor the three-day "Kermis Ball" to raise money for a Confederate monument in 1887 may belong to an early version of a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (87). The term "kermis" refers to an outdoor festival.

2831 Unnamed Women of Yoknapatawpha

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" remarks "that any woman in Frenchman's Bend and I reckon in the rest of the county too could have described" De Spain's parlor (106).

2181 Unnamed Workers at Planing Mill

As a group the men who work at the planing mill in Light in August observe and comment on the appearance and behavior of Joe Christmas and Joe Brown during and after the nearly three years these two outsiders work there too. On the Saturday Lena arrives in Jefferson, they see the smoke of the fire and joke about it - and about the Burdens, who they see as outsiders too.

2692 Unnamed World War I Soldiers 1

As he waits for Dr. Schofield to amputate his injured leg in "The Tall Men," Buddy McCallum recalls the time he was wounded during World War I: "there was a heap" of American soldiers lying "outside a field dressing station" waiting for medical attention (51).

3104 Unnamed World War I Soldiers 2

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

3115 Unnamed Would-be Lynchers

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, as soon as the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (206, 11).

2219 Unnamed Wounded Civil War Soldiers

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

3790 Unnamed Wounded Male Soldiers

As they wait for Linda Kohl to return from the Spanish Civil War in The Mansion, Chick Mallison reminds his uncle about the "men soldiers" from Yoknapatawpha who have "come home wounded from a war" (121). The way he says it - "Men soldiers yes, of course yes" - suggests he is thinking mainly of Confederate soldiers and the Civil War, but the fictions include wounded veterans of the Spanish-American and the First World Wars.

3389 Unnamed Wounded Veteran of World War I

In The Town Charles mentions that "one of Captain McClendon's company was wounded in the first battle in which American troops were engaged and was back in his uniform with his wound stripe in 1918" (123). He is the first veteran of World War I to return to Jefferson. (Historically, this first battle was the Battle of Cantigny, 28 May 1918.)

1468 Unnamed Writers

In The Unvanquished Bayard evokes "the men who have written" of the kind of woman he identifies Drusilla with at this point in the story: the "woman of thirty" (228). Although no writers are named, Balzac was one of Faulkner's favorite writers, and he may be be thinking of the character Julie in Honoré de Balzac's 1842 novel La femme de trente ans (A Woman of Thirty).

3390 Unnamed Yankee Raiders

The Town refers to the "Yankee raiders" who were present in Mississippi during the Civil War as the stuff of "legend" - the legend of the treasure that remains hidden where the plantation owners supposedly buried their "money and plate" to keep them safe from these invaders (8). (In earlier Yoknapatawpha fictions, the Sartorises did bury their silver and Union troops did dig it up.)

2222 Unnamed Yankees in Crowd

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 "casual Yankees" who, like "the poor whites" and "the southerners who had lived for a while in the north," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).

1539 Unnamed Yoknapatawpha Cotton Growers

Cotton is the main crop of Yoknapatawpha, and as Flags in the Dust points out, it is raised by two very different kinds of growers - planters or croppers - on two very different kinds of land: the "other planters further up the valley" from the Sartorises own the county's rich bottom land, while the "smaller croppers" have to manage "with their tilted fields among the hills" (289).

1399 Unnamed Yoknapatawpha Indians

The tribe of Indians in "Red Leaves" is not given a name. In his later fictions Faulkner identifies the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha first as "Choctaw," then as "Chickasaw." Historically, they were part of the Chickasaw nation, but Faulkner's Indians are not particularly historical. For example, in this story they are associated several times with cannibalism (314, 319).

2888 Unnamed Young Chickasaw Men

The group of "young men" who are attracted to Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" includes, but is by no means limited to, Owl-by-Night and Sylvester's John (363). Without exception, these would-be suitors "look away" from her once Ikkemotubbe's interest becomes known (363). They even help him in his efforts to attract her attention. At the end of the story, at least some of these "young men" leave the plantation on the steamboat with David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe (380), but the text does not say how far they go.

1987 Unnamed Young Fellows

These young fellows in "Hair" are "loafers that pitch dollars all day long in the clubhouse yard" (141) while waiting to flirt with the young girls who walk by. ("Clubhouse" is almost surely a misprint for "court house"; see the Location entry for Courthouse Square in "Hair.")

3514 Unnamed Young Girl

Ratliff hypothesizes in The Mansion that one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend might "persuade" a young girl on a Wednesday night to go "off into the bushes before her paw or maw noticed she was missing" (134).

398 Unnamed Young Girls 1

These young ladies in "A Rose for Emily," the "daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries," are the students to whom Emily Grierson teaches the decorative art of "china-painting" (128).

1988 Unnamed Young Girls 2

These young girls in "Hair" come "giggling down to the post office and soda fountain in the late afternoon" (141) to flirt with the young fellows.

2467 Unnamed Young Girls 3

The "chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes" whom Shreve imagines in Absalom! are decked out for a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262).

1624 Unnamed Young Man at Belle's 1

This "youth in a battered ford" drives by the Mitchell house to pick up "the girl Frankie" (193) in Flags in the Dust. He is probably part of the young set that congregates around Belle Mitchell, and that her husband Harry describes as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). They seem to be just a few years younger than Horace or Bayard. (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.)

1625 Unnamed Young Man at Belle's 2

This is the person referred to simply as "another young man" by the narrator of Flags in the Dust; he comes by the Mitchell house to play tennis. Harry Mitchell describes the set who congregate around his wife as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.)

2251 Unnamed Young Man in Beyond

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He assumes that the Judge is looking for his own wife, and he sympathizes with him because "It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you" (784).

3714 Unnamed Young Man Sartoris Killed

In The Reivers the "twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth" who was killed by Colonel John Sartoris cannot be specifically identified (73). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Sartoris kills a number of different men. If Faulkner is thinking of one of them here, it is most likely the man Sartoris shot as a robber in both Flags in the Dust (1929) and "An Odor of Verbena," the last story in The Unvanquished (1938).

2672 Unnamed Young Men in Frenchman's Bend

In Quick's account of Buck Thorpe's life in Frenchman's Bend in "Tomorrow," he mentions "about a half a dozen" other young men who both fought with Thorpe and often sat on the gallery at Varner's store listening to and laughing at his talk (109). The fighting is described as violent - he beats his adversaries "unconscious from time to time by foul means and even by fair on occasion" - and the talking is described as drunken (109).

2967 Unnamed Young Men in Jefferson

This is the group that the narrator of Intruder in the Dust refers to (twice) as "the young men and some not so young" (27, 39) who "work hard all week [hanging around] in the poolhall" (39). They are also identified with the barber shop, and on ordinary evenings after the movie ends at least some of them can be found "drinking coca cola and playing nickels into the drugstore jukebox" (208). Some of them "have some vague connection with cotton or automobiles or land- and stock-sales"; all of them bet on "prize fights and punchboards and national ballgames" (39).

3116 Unnamed Young Men of Ikkemotubbe

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

3206 Unnamed Young Northern Woman

Requiem for a Nun's narrator creates this 'character' as a point of reference. As part of his description of Jefferson's "Female Academy," he mentions a hypothetical "young female from Long Island or Philadelphia" who receives an invitation "signed by Queen Victoria" (177).

3207 Unnamed Young Southern Woman

Requiem for a Nun establishes the social status of Jefferson's "Female Academy" by referring to the value that a "certificate" from it has for "a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" (177).

1927 Unnamed Young Women in New York

During the First World War, Ruby worked in New York City, where according to her description in Sanctuary "even the little ratty girls [were] wearing silk," presumably as presents from all the "soldiers with money to spend" (278).

1605 Unnamed Young Writer

Identified as the "son of a carpenter," this "youth" in Flags in the Dust occupies only half a paragraph of text, but his story contains a number of intriguing details (181). Despite his blue-collar origin, Belle Mitchell decides to "make a poet" of him, and sends him to New Orleans presumably as part of that process (181). Faulkner also wanted to be a poet, and went to New Orleans at the start of his writing career.

3392 Unnamed Younger Bondsman

In The Town Ratliff calls the first man sent to Jefferson by the company that insures the bond on Mayor de Spain a "pleasant young feller" who realizes at the end of "one quick horrified day" that settling Gavin's law suit calls for someone with more experience (87).

3393 Unnamed Younger Generation in Jefferson

For a long time prior to 1904, at least according to Charles' account in The Town, "the young people" of Jefferson accepted the rule of their elders, but De Spain's candidacy for mayor "was the opportunity which that whole contemporary generation of young people had been waiting for, not just in Jefferson but everywhere," to change the status quo (12). As voters, this younger generation gives De Spain a landslide victory: "they had displaced the old dug-in aldermen and themselves rode into office as the city fathers on Manfred de Spain's coat-tails" (14).

1957 Unnamed Youngest Brother of German Prisoner

The youngest of four German brothers in "Ad Astra" flourishes in the German military service, beginning as a "cadet of dragoons" (417) and eventually becoming an aviator. When his eldest brother last sees him, he "iss now ace with iron cross by the kaiser's own hand" (419). In 1916, he is shot down by the Canadian air ace Bishop.

2725 Unnamed Youngest Negro in Delta Camp

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339).

1627 Unnamed Youth

In Flags in the Dust, while Bayard recovers from his first accident, this "youth who hung around one of the garages in town" drives his car to Memphis for repairs (267).

3779 Unspecified Compson Ancestors

In the "Appendix, Compson:1699-1945" that Faulkner wrote in 1946, seventeen years after The Sound and the Fury was first published, he traces the Compson patrimony all the way back to Scotland in the 18th century. The 1929 novel, however, contains only a few much vaguer references to the family history; Jason thinks, for example, about the "governors and generals" in the family past (230), and Quentin thinks that "one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals" (101). It's likely that the Compson that Mr. Compson mentions as his father's "father" (76) was the governor.

884 V.K. Ratcliffe II

In The Mansion this is the member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family who gets as far west as Tennessee.

462 V.K. Ratcliffe III

This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).

463 V.K. Suratt|Ratliff

This is one of Faulkner's favorite characters. He appears under two different last names, first as V.K. Suratt (in his first four appearances, in texts published through early 1932), then - apparently after someone named 'Suratt' complained to Faulkner - as V.K. Ratliff in six more texts, beginning in early 1934. Under either name he is an itinerant sewing machine salesman who travels throughout Yoknapatawpha at first on a wagon drawn by a sturdy mismatched team of horses, and then in a small, specially outfitted truck.

1785 Van

In Sanctuary Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment after that.

756 Vangie Burden

She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. "Vangie" is presumably a nickname for "Evangeline," which is her mother's name. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes.

681 Vardaman Bundren

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman is the fifth and youngest child of Anse and Addie Bundren. He narrates ten chapters in which we follow the progression of a child's grieving process after the death of a parent. He also reveals poignant and specific examples of the poverty in which he resides. He is described by the other narrators as very small. (Vardaman is named after James K. Vardaman, who served one term each as Mississippi's Governor [1904-1908] and Senator [1913-1919]; he was a militant white supremacist whom his supporters called "The Great White Chief.")

2899 Vardaman Gowrie

Vardaman Gowrie and his brother Bilbo are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). Intruder in the Dust treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body.

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.

2650 Varner, Children of Will and Maggie

Will and Maggie Varner have produced sixteen children. Jody and Eula are important characters in The Hamlet and other texts. The remaining fourteen children are summarily described as "scattered, married and buried, from El Paso to the Alabama line" (6). Will suggests that this "mess of children" are largely male, a "passel of boys" who "soon as they got big enough to be worth anything . . . done married and moved away" (339).

3617 Varner, Father of Will

The Mansion mentions in passing that Will Varner looks "like what his father had been," a Confederate cavalrymen who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest (18).

2651 Varner, Future Wife of Jody

The Hamlet looks over three decades into the future to describe the eventual end of Jody Varner's invisible bachelorhood in rather stark, but grammatically conditional terms: when Jody turns "sixty five," he "would be caught and married by a creature not yet seventeen probably, who would for the rest of her life continue to take revenge upon him for her whole sex" (352).

3618 Varner, Wife of Will 2

In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

3703 Vera

In The Reivers Vera works as one of the prostitutes at Miss Reba's. Because she is away, "visiting her folks up in Paducah," Boon and Lucius stay in her room (99).

978 Vernon 1

The "Vernon" who appears briefly in The Sound and the Fury is not Vernon Tull. This one is the husband of Myrtle, the Sheriff's daughter. He and Myrtle are in the Sheriff's house when Jason comes to report that he has been robbed.

721 Vernon 2

In "Death Drag" Vernon owns the café where Captain Warren and Jock talk. He seems like an attentive and successful businessman; people know his place by his name, and Jock and Captain Warren seem comfortable there. He may be the same "Vernon" who is married to the Sheriff's daughter in The Sound and the Fury, though there is no direct evidence of that. He is certainly not the Vernon - Vernon Tull - who lives in Frenchman's Bend.

491 Vernon Tull

Vernon Tull is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who appears in ten different Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying he narrates six of the novel's sections, which gives readers a particularly intimate connection to him; in these chapters he is one of the novel's more reliable commentators, particularly when he suggests that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71).

959 Vernon Tull's Father

In As I Lay Dying Vernon Tull mentions his father as he recounts his mother's long life and death.

1336 Vernon Tull's Mother

The "mammy" that Vernon Tull speaks of in As I Lay Dying is his biological mother - not a black caregiver or wet nurse, as would be the case with a 'mammy' in an upper class white Yoknapatawpha family. Vernon thinks of her in reference to the hard lot women have in life: she "lived to be seventy and more" having worked everyday of her life and never having been sick (30). At the end of that life she puts on "that lace-trimmed night gown she had had for forty-five years and never wore," lays down, and tells her family "I'm tired" (30).

958 Vernon Tull's Siblings

In As I Lay Dying, Vernon Tull mentions the "last chap" his mother had as he recounts his mother's long life and death (30). That wording implies he had more than one sibling, but there is no way to say how many more.

63 Versh Gibson

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.

2903 Vinson Gowrie

Vinson, the 28-year-old white man whose murder launches Intruder in the Dust, is the youngest of Nub and Amanda Gowrie's six sons. The only one "with an aptitude for trading and for money," he can write checks that the local banks will honor and is "said to own several small parcels" of Yoknapatawpha farmland (162). The business he is engaged in at the time of his death is harvesting timber in partnership with his brother Crawford.

3704 Virgil

The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190).

876 Virgil Beard

In Flags in the Dust Virgil Beard is a "pale, quiet boy of twelve or so" (104), the son of the people who own the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives. To disguise his handwriting in the letters he sends Narcissa, Byron gets Virgil to write them by promising to buy him an air rifle. Despite Snopes' attempts to dodge that promise, Virgil is shrewd enough to make sure that he gets his gun - and uses it to kill a mockingbird.

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).

16 Virginia Sartoris Du Pre

Virginia Du Pre - or as she is called more frequently, Aunt Jenny - is the sister of Colonel John and the first in the series of formidable dowagers in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. She traveled to Yoknapatawpha a few years after the end of the Civil War that saw her father and husband killed and the family mansion in Carolina burned down. She brought with her a handful of flower cuttings from the ancestral estate which in Mississippi's less congenial soil she nurtures into an equally lush garden.

737 Virginius Holland

In "Smoke," Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15), but have different temperaments. Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, tries to mediate between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.

70 Virginius MacCallum I|Anse McCallum

The patriarch of the family that first appears in Flags in the Dust as the MacCallums and then re-appears in the 1940s as the McCallums also has two first names: Virginius (in Flags) and then Anse (in The Hamlet and "The Tall Men"). At the start of the Civil War he walked from Mississippi to Virginia to enlist (because his mother came from Virginia) and served til the surrender at Appomattox.

69 Virginius MacCallum's Father

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.

885 Vladimir Kyrilytch Ratcliffe I

In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338).

3436 Vladimir Lenin

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin led the Communist revolution against czarist rule in Russia, and was the head of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Gavin mentions him in The Mansion when he refers to Communist Russia as "Lenin's frankenstein" (259).

2361 Vynie

The woman whom the narrator of "Fool about a Horse" calls "Mammy" is named "Vynie." She works hard and frugally to contribute to her family's farm income, so she is resentful, suspicious, and caustic about her husband's misadventures in horse-trading. When his foolishness results in the loss of the milk separator she wanted, she cries for the first time in her son's experience. Still resolute, she goes off alone to recover the separator, but in the end she is as big a fool about that machine as her husband is about the horse.

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