Character Keys

V.K. Suratt's "oldest brother" appears briefly in Flags in the Dust as the person who taught him how "to chop cotton" fast if he wanted to keep from losing his toes (137).

In the story V.K. Suratt tells in Flags in the Dust about Doctor Peabody amputating his grandfather's leg, he mentions that the whiskey and (presumably) the pain caused "granpappy" to "cuss and sing so scandalous" that "the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn" until the operation was over (136). (Suratt himself appears frequently in the fictions, in the later ones as V.K. Ratliff. His character remains essentially the same, but in those later fictions the Ratliff family is different from this Suratt one.)

In Flags in the Dust the other people in the waiting room where Dr. Alford, Jenny and Old Bayard wait to see the Memphis specialist are described as "quiet" (246).

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).

The country people of Yoknapatawpha, the people who live outside Jefferson, have a smaller presence in The Town than in many other fictions, but as a group they are mentioned several times. For example, when Gavin Stevens starts campaigning for County Attorney, he "began to talk like the people he would lean on fences or squat against the walls of country stores with" (176).

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.)

In The Town these grocery distributors accept Wallstreet's commercial methods and innovations as congenial to their own.

In The Town these veterans who served in McLendon's company in the first World War return to Jefferson early in 1919, "except two dead from flu and a few in hospital," "all home again to wear their uniforms too around the Square for a while" (123).

In his hypothetical account in The Town of the deal Flem made with Eula that allowed Linda to leave home, Gavin assumes the presence of "two witnesses waiting" outside the room until she is ready to sign the agreement he has drawn up (304).

In his reconstruction of Flem moving his money to the Bank of Jefferson in The Town, Gavin imagines him being "stopped on the street one day" by this share cropper, "one still in the overalls and the tieless shirt . . . attached irrevocably by the lean umbilicus of bare livelihood . . . to the worn-out tenant farm" (281). He looks at Flem "with envy and respect (ay, and hatred too)" for having "wrenched himself free" of "the overalls and the grinding landlord" that define the costume and the world of a tenant farmer.

These are the "young men" in The Town who do or someday might court Linda Snopes (297). They exist both in fact - "half the football and baseball teams escort her home from school in the afternoon and squire her in gangs to the picture show during her junior and senior high school years" (299) - and in Flem's mind, as the threat to his control over his daughter and her potential inheritance.

Gavin briefly mentions these people in his vision of Yoknapatawpha in the past in The Town: the slaves who belonged to Issetibbeha, a Chickasaw chief (331).

In The Town Linda Snopes asks "someone" in Oxford to tell her who was "the nicest lawyer for her to go to" about drawing up a will (343). The novel says nothing about this "someone," but since Oxford is where Faulkner lived, and the lawyer whom this person recommends is Faulkner's close friend [Phil] Stone, to whom the novel is dedicated, it's fun to wonder if Faulkner wrote himself into the novel in the role of this "someone."

When I.O. blunders in The Town by saying "I reckon it's a few things I could tell a jury myself about - ," this unnamed man asks him, "Tell the jury about what?" (253).

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

This man, the senior of the two representatives from the company that bonds De Spain in The Town, has "gray hair" and comes to town wearing "striped britches and a gold watch chain big enough to boom logs with and gold eyeglasses and even a gold toothpick and the pigeon-tailed coat and the plug hat" (88).

This person in The Town is first to notice that one of Byron's children is wearing the collar from Mrs. Widrington's missing dog: "One day the four Snopes Indians came out of Christian's drugstore and somebody passing on the street pointed his finger and hollered 'Look!'" (381).

In The Town these families, including "engineers and contractors and such like" (380), moved to Jefferson with the city's modernization of its streets.

In The Town the porter accompanies the conductor as he signals for Byron Snopes's four children to board the train. (He could be the same man as the porter on the train that brought the children to Jefferson a few days earlier, but that is not made explicit.)

In The Town Tom Tom Bird's "substitute, who fires the boilers on Sunday" (26), also fills in for him when Tom Tom keeps lookout at home.

In The Town, these two men carry the medallion of Eula across the railroad platform to Gavin's car.

This entry represents every "porter and waiter" on the staff of the Holston Hotel in The Town; according to Ratliff, they find the older bondsman from St. Louis so charming that they hang around his door, hoping for a chance to "wait on him" (88).

According to The Town, I.O. Snopes sells mules to "farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could get, down to some last irreducible figure" (245).

In his hypothetical account in The Town of Flem's return to Frenchman's Bend in 1927, Gavin mentions the members of the church there, but only in the context of Mrs. Varner's authoritarian control of the "terrified congregation" and the "ministers" whom she "selects and chooses and hires" herself - she "fires them too when they don't suit her" (306). Still according to Gavin, one of these ministers was plowing "a cotton field" when she passed by in her buggy and noticed him: she ordered him "to go home and bathe and change his clothes" before she "ordained" him herself (306).

In The Town, these unnamed "loafers, Negro and white boys too," watch the Cotillion couples arrive at the Opera House (76).

As exceptions to his portrait of the local population in The Town as Protestant ("Baptists and Methodists," 320), Charles mentions these "two Jews brothers with their families, who ran two clothing stores": "One of them had been trained in Russia to be a rabbi and spoke seven languages including classic Greek and Latin and worked geometry problems for relaxation" (320). These are the only Jewish inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha ever mentioned.

The "mothers" of Jefferson appear as a distinct group several times in The Town. They bring their little children to the kindergarten class in which Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey Snopes are already enrolled, for example. We also use this entry to refer to the larger group that Gavin refers to as "Southern mothers" - the women who want "their daughters" to attend college in Virginia (221).

This is the woman in The Town - identified only as "the second lady" - who condescendingly reproves Maggie Mallison for calling on Eula Snopes (53).

In The Town Jefferson housewives eventually drive to Wallstreet's self-service grocery store to "seek his bargains and carry them home themselves" (157).

These aldermen are elected officials who (along with the town mayor) govern Jefferson. In The Town, the board of aldermen meets to consider Gavin Stevens' complaint against Mayor de Spain. (See also Unnamed Alderman in this index.)

In The Town this man comes to Jefferson to determine his company's liability for Mrs. Widrington's lost dog.

In The Town these "husbands and beaus" reluctantly bought at least one corsage for their Cotillion Club partners, following Gavin's example (73).

In The Town Wall Snopes hires this boy "to come before daylight on the winter mornings to build the fire and sweep" the grocery store (136).

According to Charles in The Town Walter's grandfather was a slave who "had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167).

In The Town Ratliff reports that Will Varner had three "mulatto concubines" - the "first Negroes" in Frenchman's Bend, "and for a time the only ones [Varner] would permit there" (289).

In The Town these jurors indict Mink Snopes for murdering Zack Houston.

In The Town after Linda Snopes stops seeing Matt Levitt, she goes to the movies "with another girl or maybe two or three of them" (205).

The minister who leads Eula's memorial service in Jefferson in The Town is "the old Methodist minister who had christened her thirty-eight years ago" in Frenchman's Bend; he is described as "an old man who had been a preacher all his adult life but would have for the rest of it the warped back and the wrenched bitter hands of a dirt farmer" (360). He is mentioned again in The Mansion, where Ratliff calls him "the old Methodist preacher that had baptised Eula" (163).

As Ratliff explains to Charles in The Town, during World War I Montgomery Ward Snopes ran brothels in France. He began in a little town with "a young French lady he happened to know" (120; since Charles is only five at the time, Ratliff resorts to evasive terms), then set up a bigger brothel in Paris, "adding more and more entertaining ladies to that-ere new canteen he set up in Paris" (121). The ladies themselves are not described in any more detail. (Prostitution was legal in France at this time, though it was illegal to run a brothel.)

In The Town these poor people, who are housed by the county, know about Mr. Hait's death and have "heard that Mrs. Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him" (242).

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott mentions "her fiance" when she explains to Wall Snopes why she cannot accept his marriage proposal; all the text says about him is that she is sure that, if he and Wall ever met, they "would be friends" (154).

Gavin speculates in The Town that this "small though thrifty farmer" (157) finds the money to save his son-in-law's business.

The narrators in The Town refer in several ways to the morally self-righteous members of the community. They can be found among the Presbyterian and Episcopal congregations in Yoknapatawpha, but Baptists and Methodists are the county's principal white Protestant groups. Charles notes, for example, that "ours was a town founded by Aryan Baptists and Methodists" (320; there is no "Aryan" sect in the Baptist church - Faulkner may have meant 'Arian Baptists,' but if "Aryan" is deliberate, he is presumably using the adjective to mean 'white' or even 'white-supremacist').

In The Town Sheriff Hub Hampton's "office deputy," Miss Elma, is identified as the "widow of the sheriff Mr Hampton had succeeded last time" (183). This previous sheriff is not otherwise described.

A large crowd comes to watch Mink Snopes' trial for murder in The Town; people are "still crowding in long after they had run out of anything to set on" (86).

In The Town, the potential customers asking for directions to the Snopes Hotel are "country men" - men from the countryside outside Jefferson - who "were told simply to walk in that direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it" (42). (The woman is I.O. Snopes' wife. Faulkner here spells "country men" as two words, but our name spells it as one word, which Faulkner himself did elsewhere; see Unnamed Countrymen 1, for example, in this index.)

The Jefferson couples who receive invitations to the Cotillion Dance in The Town represent the town's social elite. Charles describes their appearance as "crimped and frizzed in scarves and earrings and perfume and long white gloves like Mother or in claw-hammer coats and boiled shirts and white ties and yesterday's haircuts like Father and Uncle Gavin" (75-76).

These men in The Town are described as Jefferson's "storekeepers and doctors and lawyers and mayors and such as that"; their "quiet and peaceful" suppers are disturbed by the sound of Manfred De Spain's car when he passes by the Mallison house (62).

This "Chinese laundryman" mentioned in The Town is the only Asian character who appears in Yoknapatawpha. Charles Mallison explains why, although he is not white, this man is in a category that is distinct from the one that the other non-white - i.e. Negro - inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha belong to: "And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even kindless, half the world or anyway half the continent . . . sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule" (321).