Character Keys

Two characters referred to as "Major de Spain" appear in fifteen different fictions. Only one was a real Confederate "Major" during the Civil War; the other is his son, Manfred, who fought in the Spanish-American War as a Lieutenant but is called "Major" as a courtesy, and as a sign of the family's high status in Yoknapatawpha. They never appear together, but in four texts - "Shall Not Perish," The Town, The Mansion and The Reivers - both are referred to, and in those cases, it is easy to tell which "De Spain" Faulkner has in mind.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Mannie has been married to Rider for half a year when her sudden death (of unspecified causes) becomes the traumatic loss, the powerful absence, that generates the story. She is described as having a "narrow back" and "narrow" hand (241, 133). Rider indicates that she is far slighter than her powerfully built husband, but her spirit is strong: "You’s de onliest least thing whut ever kep up wid me one day, leff alone for weeks" (241, 133).

The biblical mother of Jesus is mentioned in two fictions. In The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog mentions Mary in his Easter sermon, emphasizing her sufferings as a mother, "de pangs" of childbirth, her "weeping en lamentation" as she fears for the life of her newborn child and her grief at the scene of the crucifixion (296).

Matt Bowden is described in both "Vendee" and The Unvanquished in the same words. A criminal accomplice of Grumby whose name is not mentioned until after he himself has departed for Texas, Bowden is described with unusual detail. His clothes - "neat little fine made boots," "linen shirt," and "coat that had been good once, too" (103, 166) - and even his "small" hands and feet (104, 168) suggest an upper class background. When he first appears he is posing as a planter from Tennessee chasing Grumby himself.

In the short story "Gold Is Not Always," and also in the revised version of the story in Go Down, Moses, Roth Edmonds expects to find evidence that his missing mule has been loaded into a truck and taken to Memphis, an so intends to report her as stolen to the Jefferson sheriff and the Memphis police.

The Negro maid who works in Miss Reba's Memphis brothel appears in four novels. In Sanctuary, where she is named Minnie, she is a kind of confidant and guardian to Temple - either because Popeye pays her, or because she is afraid of him. This role is made explicit in her next appearance, in Requiem for a Nun, where she is not named: Temple describes her as both her guard and the one person with whom she could "talk" (111-12).

In "Hand upon Waters" Ike tells Stevens that Lonnie Grinnup had saved his "burying money" with Mitchell "at the store" (73). It's clear that the money is for his funeral expenses, but not clear who "Mitchell" is in this context. He could be the store owner (though in all the other fictions where the Frenchman's Bend store occurs, it is owned by the Varners), or - as seems more likely - Mitchell is a local undertaker, whose clients put money away for him at the store, which thus functions as a kind of bank for the people who live outside the town.

In Flags in the Dust the man "with an army pilot's wings on his breast" drinking with Bayard in the Chicago nightclub flew with the Sartoris twins in the British air corps during World War I (384). In the later short story "Ad Astra," set at the front during that war, Monaghan describes himself as "shanty Irish," because his late father made "a million dollars digging sewers in the ground" (414). He is also a former student at Yale. Monaghan seems uncomfortable with his complex social status, and there is "something of the crucified" about him after three years of war (414).

Lucius Binford - or as he's called in two of the three novels in which he is mentioned or appears, Mr. Binford - is the business and romantic partner of Reba Rivers, the madame of a Memphis brothel. In The Mansion he is referred to as a "pimp" (80). In The Reivers, the one novel he actually appears in, Lucius Priest says his "official" title is "landlord" (110). He is a little man, but there is something menancing about him; the first thing you notice about him, Lucius says, is "his eyes . . .

In both "Barn Burning" and The Hamlet this Mr. Harris is the farmer who brings Ab Snopes to trial after a dispute between them over a hog leads to the burning of Harris' barn. He is only mentioned in the novel. In the short story he is shown as both furious with Ab, and - when he decides against forcing Sarty Snopes to testify against his own father - compassionate for Ab's son .

Maxey owns the town barber shop in both "Hair" (1931) and Light in August (1932). He is a minor character in both texts, but plays a more central role in "Hair," where the narrator relies on Maxey for information about the story's major characters. (The Jefferson barber shop is a location in eight fictions. It's possible that Faulkner imagined Maxey as its owner in one or more other stories.)

In both the story "Go Down, Moses," and the story as Faulkner published it in Go Down, Moses, Mr. Wilmoth is the editor the Jefferson newspaper. He is described as "an older man, though with hair less white than [Gavin] Stevens', in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat" (259, 355).

In Flags in the Dust she manages the boarding house where Byron Snopes stays, until he moves in order to escape the persistence of her son Virgil. In Light in August, it is another Byron who lives in her hotel - Bryon Bunch.

The wife of Major de Spain is mentioned in "A Bear Hunt," when Ratliff wonders if she already owns a sewing machine - or may have given it to "one of her married daughters" (63). These daughters are never mentioned again, but Mrs. de Spain herself appears briefly but vividly in "Barn Burning" when Ab Snopes tracks manure onto the expensive "blond rug" inside the front door of her mansion (12).

The name Holston is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha, but in both "Skirmish at Sartoris" and the reprinting of the story in The Unvanquished this character appears only as a name in the phrase "Mrs. Holston's porter" (71, 207). He is a hotel porter, and presumably works at the Holston House, one of the oldest buildings in Jefferson. As we know from other fictions, it was established by Alexander Holston; it seems to be owned now by this Mrs. Porter, who may be his daughter.

The two-story Frenchman's Bend boarding house that Mrs. Littlejohn owns appears in five different texts. She herself appears in three of them - "Spotted Horses," The Hamlet and The Town - as a witness to the hapless efforts of "them fool men," as she puts it in the first story, to buy the Texas ponies (174). And she is not simply a spectator: when one of the horses invades her house, she breaks a washboard over its head. She plays her largest role in The Hamlet. Described there as a "man-tall, man-grim woman" wearing a "faded wrapper" (219), Mrs.

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This Mrs. Pruitt is the wife of the President of the Compress Association in Mottstown is having an affair with the uncle of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine."

In Intruder in the Dust, the wife of the county jailer is only mentioned when the jailer, a man named "Tubbs," says "I got a wife and two children" (52). She appears in both the prose and the dramatic sections of Act III in Requiem for a Nun, though she is only named when in the latter jailer Tubbs mentions "Mrs Tubbs" (208). The prose section describes her as a woman "engaged in something as intimate as cooking a meal" (200).

The "Negro women" in "A Rose for Emily" appear only in a negative phrase identifying Colonel Sartoris as the Jefferson mayor who "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (119-20). We hear nothing else about these women or this edict, whether they complied or it was enforced or when it might have been rescinded. The "apron" would have typified, not to say stereo-typified, all black women as domestic servants.

Described in The Hamlet as "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. At the end of that novel, he and Ratliff and Armstid are swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place - an event that is referred to again in The Mansion.

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (229, 81).

The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In Absalom! the inhabitants of Jefferson span several generations.

In "Two Soldiers" Pete Grier, the oldest of the two Grier sons, enlists in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "I got to go," he says; "I jest ain't going to put up with no folks treating the United States that way" (83). Before December 7, 1941, he worked on his family's farm in Frenchman's Bend. The "ten acres" of land he himself owns was given to him by his father "when he graduated from the Consolidated" (82). According to his younger brother, who idolizes him, Pete was a very hard worker: "He never got behind like Pap, let alone stayed behind" (82).

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).

"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr.

This man is the character in "A Rose for Emily" who protests, "in diffident deprecation" (122), that the town must do something about the smell coming from the Grierson house.

Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts.

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

There is a Frenchman's Bend character named "Samson" in both As I Lay Dying, where he narrates a section of the narrative, and Light in August, where only his name appears. In the first novel, he lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. The barn suggests he is farmer, but when his section begins he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112), which may mean he also owns a country store.

The first set of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are on the road, trying to catch up with the Union Army as it moves across Mississippi. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40).

In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, the top sergeant in the Union troop that arrives at Sartoris is named Harrison. He may be the Yankee who is first spotted by Ringo and Bayard looking at the plantation through field glasses; if so, it is his horse that they kill attempting to shoot him. He was clearly angered by that shooting, which cost the regiment "the best horse in the whole army" (29). Much more hostile to Rosa Millard than his commanding officer, he orders other soldiers to search the house in search of the "little devils" who did the shooting (29).

This unnamed deputy recounts the second and last section of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, although much of the language used to characterize him serves to undermine his authority as a narrator. He is "spent" and "a little hysterical too" after both the manhunt for Rider and the lynching (252), and his wife shows no sympathy at all for him or for the story he's trying to tell her. Instead, she offers the narrative’s only portrait of the deputy sheriff: "You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long talking.

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. "A Rose for Emily" brings the townspeople as a collection onstage in the story's very first sentence, where the narrator refers to "our whole town" (119).

The narrator of "A Courtship" uses the phrase "the People" to describe the tribe to which he and the other Indian characters in the story belong, as in this sentence: "The People all lived in the Plantation now" (361). He does not explicitly say they are Chickasaws, the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in most of Faulkner's references to the indigenous population, but that they are part of the Chickasaw nation can be inferred from his reference to David Colbert as "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" describes Tobe as "an old man-servant - a combined gardener and cook" (119), and never refers to him except as "the Negro" or "the Negro man" (120, 122, etc.). The only time we hear his name is when Emily uses it to summon him (121). He appears to have been in her employ since he was "young man" (122), and at least since the time her father died. Earlier drafts of "A Rose for Emily" include an extended conversation between him and Emily. His role in the published version of the story is entirely silent and elusive.

Both "The Hound" and Book 3, Chapter Two, Section 2 of The Hamlet - where the story of "The Hound" is re-told as part of the Snopes saga - briefly describe the townspeople whom Cotton|Mink Snopes sees while being driven through Jefferson to jail as "children" at play who are wearing "small bright garments," and "men and women" heading home at suppertime "to plates of food and cups of coffee" (163, 285).

Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72).

In Flags in the Dust Turpin is the Frenchman's Bend farmer (or tenant farmer) at whose "low, broken backed log house" Byron Snopes stops on his flight from Jefferson after robbing the bank (279). Two Frenchman's Bend 'Turpins' appear in The Mansion at the other end of Faulkner's career, but how they are related to this one is never explained.

Ash, or Uncle Ash, is an old Negro who works for Major de Spain. In the five fictions in which he appears, he is most often seen in the woods, as the cook and chief servant on the Major's annual hunting trips, "a-helping around camp," as Ratliff puts it in "A Bear Hunt," where Ash first appears (67) - though in the last section of "The Bear" in the novel Go Down, Moses he sits in the corner of De Spain's office in Jefferson, pulling the cord on the "bamboo-and-paper punkah" that provides the Major with a breeze in the heat of Mississippi (301).

Called "Uncle Job" in "Smoke" and "Old Man Job" in The Town, he is the elderly Negro janitor and factotum to Judge Dukinfield.

In both Flags in the Dust and "Retreat" as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union cavalry rides up to the Sartoris plantation hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris. In all three texts he is able to fool them long enough to escape, but in the last two the Yankees then dig up the family's buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

Popeye's lawyer at his trial for murder in Sanctuary is "a young man just out of law school," with "an ugly, eager, earnest face" (311). He tries to defend his client, who is himself indifferent to the trial, with "a gaunt mixture of uncouth enthusiasm and earnest ill-judgment" (311-12).

In the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, this architect lays out both the Compson grounds and the Compson home. He shares the predilections of Faulkner's other architect characters for French furnishings, but there is no direct evidence that (like the architect at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!) he is from France.

In the three texts that tell the story of Flem Snopes' attempted embezzlement - "Centaur in Brass," The Town and The Mansion - these are the accountants employed by the state, or perhaps the company that bonds local officials, to audit the books at the Jefferson power plant. The third text revises the account to add that their figures are incorrect.

In "A Rose for Emily," the wife of the Baptist minister takes it upon herself to write to summon Emily's Alabama kin.

In "Dry September" this cashier is a "widower of about forty - a high-colored man, smelling always of the barber shop or of whisky" - who takes up with Minnie Cooper in "Dry September" (174). He owns "the first automobile" in Jefferson, in which he and Minnie take drives, scandalizing the town (174). About four years after their relationship begins, he moves to Memphis, where he works in another bank and, according to Jefferson gossip, is "prospering" (175).

Although Emily herself is an Episcopalian, this Baptist minister is "forced" by the "ladies" of Jefferson to pay her a pastoral visit rebuking her and Homer's public behavior; he "never divulges" what happened in when he confronted Emily, but he "refuses to go back" to her house again (126).