Character Keys

In Sanctuary Horace refers to the various young men who have been calling on his step-daughter Little Belle as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13). Horace seems to believe there have been many such suitors, "alert and a little impatient," sharing the hammock in the grape arbor with her in ways he finds very disconcerting (13-14), but Horace's ideas about Belle's sexuality are hardly reliable.

The young men of Frenchman's Bend who "swarm around Eula like bees around a honey pot" (166) appear in four different texts, beginning with "Spotted Horses," the text in which that quotation occurs. Their role in The Hamlet is the largest of the four. They court her for several years, "week and week and Sunday and Sunday" (148), during which time they are jealous rivals of each other until an outsider, an itinerant salesman, appears, and then they band together to drive him away.

In The Mansion V.K. Ratliff refers to "some foreigner from four or six miles away" from Frenchman's Bend who tried to court Eula Varner, but was "bushwhacked" by the local young men who put aside their rivalry long enough to drive away this outsider (131-32). Ratliff may be citing a specific case, or something that has happened more than once before McCarron - another outsider - comes courting.

This entry represents the children of Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet who attend the local school at various times, from Reconstruction to the novel's present day. According to the narrator, these boys and girls walk "back and forth in all weathers" (108) to the community schoolhouse. Many of these schoolchildren have no use for the institution at all, especially for their alcoholic professor. When Labove takes over the school, he instills discipline among the students and has a number of the "older boys" (124) build a basketball court.

This fellow student at the barber school with Fonzo and Virgil is presumably the person in Sanctuary who, twelve days after they have started sleeping at Miss Reba's, tells Fonzo about the existence in Memphis of a house of prostitution. At any rate, he accompanies them to "that house" after Fonzo convinces Virgil to go (196).

In The Reivers the "street car" conductor the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the motorman (93).

In the last chapter of Intruder in the Dust we learn that "for weeks" after the story ends, these "strangers" would ask the people of Yoknapatawpha how a man in jail could get hold of a gun to shoot himself with (232). Apparently they don't have any other questions about what has happened in the novel.

This "stranger" in Light in August is a hypothetical figure, offered by the narrator as an example of the type of person who might pay attention to the sign in front of Hightower's house, which over the years the townspeople have come to ignore, and then mention it to "some acquaintance in the town" (59).

The man who owns the "odorous and cluttered store" where Hightower shops in Light in August claims to have known "all the time" that Joe Christmas "wasn't a white man" (308) - but he does not say how he knew.

In The Town Gavin hires these "masons" to attach the medallion of Eula to her tombstone (370). These artisans should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the fraternal society who are also mentioned in the novel.

Light in August does not identify the sex of the baby that Hightower delivers in the cabin behind his house, saying only that "it was already dead" before it was born (74).

Absalom!'s third-person narrator identifies the passengers who travel on the Mississippi riverboats as "gamblers and cotton- and slavedealers" (26). Rosa refers to them as "drunken fools covered with diamonds and bent on throwing away their cotton and slaves before the boat reached New Orleans" (11).

In The Town Ratliff claims it was "the depot agent" who sent I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule - though he may have done that himself. (In "Mule in the Yard" the local man who sends I.O. the schedule is identified as the "town wag.") It is definitely an agent at the station, and so presumably the same man, who takes Flem Snopes' payment for freight charges on Eula's medallion.

In Flags in the Dust, he greets Horace Benbow warmly upon his return to Jefferson from World War I.

In Light in August the staff at the orphanage in Little Rock call the police when Doc Hines tries to have Joe admitted.

These 'characters' are the ghostly presences that, according to the narrator of Flags in the Dust, still haunt the darkened and seldom-used parlor at the Sartoris plantation house: "figures in crinoline and hooped muslin and silk," and "in gray too, with crimson sashes and sabres" (56). They seem to be conjured up by Narcissa Benbow's piano playing.

In an aside in The Reivers to his grandson about "that Cause" - i.e. the Civil War - Lucius refers to "your spinster aunts," and differentiates his idea about the War from theirs (228). Elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, such women are identified with a refusal to surrender the 'Lost Cause,' to admit either defeat or the flaws of the Old South, but what these aunts stand for here is not clear.

According to Gavin's musings in The Mansion, Jason's behavior might make one "almost believe" that he had spies in both "the Japanese Diet" and "the U.S. Cabinet too," as he seems to have advance knowledge of the coming war and the air training field that would be built in Jefferson (356). ("Diet" in this context is the name of the legislative branch of the Japanese government.)

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).

Sanctuary describes the people who watch Lee Goodwin's trial from Horace's perspective as he enters the courtroom. From this point of view they are a collection of "heads": "bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sun-baked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat" (281). The details suggest that the crowd is mostly male, but drawn from almost all the local social classes. There is, however, no suggestion that any of these people aren't white.

As at Ab Snopes' first (criminal) trial, at the second (civil) trial in "Barn Burning," in a second country store, there is again a crowd of men in attendance. Their faces this time are described as "quiet, watching" (17).

In attendance at Ab Snopes' trial for burning a barn are a group of men from the neighborhood. The narrative only describes them (three times in two pages) as a set of "grim faces," but their hostility to Snopes is unmistakable (4-5).

Describing the unveiling of Jefferson's Confederate monument in 1900, Requiem for a Nun notes that "sons" of the "old men in gray" who attend the ceremony "had already died in blue coats in Cuba" - i.e. were young men from Yoknapatawpha who died serving in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War (189).

The messenger in Light in August who tells Nathaniel Burden’s family about the "trouble" he got into in Mexico refers to the Mexicans as "them Spanish" and alludes to their animus against “white men” (244). He obviously thinks of Hispanic/Spanish as non-white, but our database follows the practice of identifying both Hispanic and Spanish racially as 'white.'

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

In his conversation with his cousin Edmonds in Part 4 of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to the "wives and daughters" of the plantation owners who fed and nursed their sick slaves both in "their stinking cabins" and, "when they were very sick," in "the big house itself" (271).

Mr. Compson creates this profile of "a Southern lady" in Absalom, Absalom! while telling Quentin about Rosa Coldfield's behavior after her sister Ellen dies (68). According to his misogynistic generalization, the "Southern lady" is "like a vampire" in the way she will feed herself and her idea of what she is entitled to off the lives of her relatives or in-laws (68).

In "The Bear" the narrative notes that "in April" school is always let out "so that the sons of farmers could help with the land's planting" (291).

In The Sound and the Fury Deacon tells Quentin that the reason he marched in the parade "on that Wop holiday" (presumably Columbus Day, 98) was to help his son-in-law "get a job on the city forces" as a "street cleaner" (98). Deacon also calls him "that son of a bitch," and implies he's very lazy (99).

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.

The young woman who has an affair and a child with Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses tells Ike that her father died while his family lived in Indianapolis. No mention is made of her mother. One of her "folks" is a child of James Beauchamp, and so descended from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, but we cannot say definitively that it was her father rather than her mother (343). (In the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," the young woman and her family are not connected to the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, so her father in that story has his own entry in the database.)

In "Ad Astra," because of the War, this young son of the captured German aviator, who lives in Bayreuth with his mother, has never seen his father.

This "someone" in The Hamlet finds the buggy whip which either Eula Varner or Hoake McCarron lost when they were assaulted by the unnamed suitors (153).

To explain his father's decision to move east to the Tidewater, Sutpen speculates in Absalom! about a "somebody" who might have influenced the decision, and comes up with three different possibilities: "somebody, some traveler," who praised the quality of life in the Tidewater; or "perhaps somebody his father knew once . . . [who] happened to think about him; or "someone kin to him . . . [who] had sent for him" (181). Sutpen's musings here resemble the novel's larger pattern of speculation, as Rosa, Mr.

This is the "someone (not General Compson)" in Absalom! who is in Jefferson in 1833 on the day Sutpen arrives and who looks into his covered wagon to see what or who is there (27).

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).

Colonel Sartoris' first military command was the regiment that he raised at the beginning of the Civil War. According to Uncle Buck McCaslin in "Retreat," Sartoris "bought and paid for" it, which presumably means that Sartoris underwrote the costs of arming and equipping the unit, though no further details about that process are provided (21).

At the request of Mrs. McKellogg, a soldier driving "a big car" takes the Grier boy home from Memphis in "Two Soldiers" (99).

When Minnie Cooper starts drinking in "Dry September," the "youth" who supplies her with whiskey is identified as "a clerk at the soda fountain" (175). (Selling liquor was illegal in Yoknapatawpha, except that doctors and drugstores could dispense it for medicinal purposes, which probably explains how this clerk has access to the alcohol.)

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" this polite "small boy in overalls" whom Suratt sees beside the barn three miles from town does not get his joke about Flem and goats (140).

As the proprietor of the largest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, Sutpen owned a much larger group of slaves than his original twenty slaves from the Caribbean and the additional several slaves whom the narrator specifically refers to. Absalom! notes, for example, that over the years the "wild" Negroes whom Sutpen "had brought into the country" mix with other enslaved Negroes - "the tame which was already there" (67).

None of The Unvanquished stories ever refer directly to the slaves who worked for the Sartorises in the fields. In "Vendee" as both a short story and a chapter in the novel, Ab Snopes tells Bayard that Rosa Millard's death came as a result of what Ab and Rosa were doing "for [Bayard's] sake and his paw and them niggers" (109, 174).

Like other Indian tribes in the old South, the Indians of Yoknapatawpha own slaves in various Faulkner fictions. The slaves of the Chickasaw who appear in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are specifically referred to as the slaves of Mohataha, Ikketubbe's mother who rules the tribe in those texts. In the short story and in Act I of the novel, these enslaved people purchase items at the Indian agency-store in the settlement (17).

In a passage Faulkner added to "Retreat" when the story was published as a chapter in The Unvanquished, Bayard describes the unconventional way Buck and Buddy treat the large number of enslaved people they inherited from their father. The two white slave-owners move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" (46), and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night.

A number of Mississippi Indians did own slaves, and in "Red Leaves" and "A Justice," Faulkner's other Indian stories, he explores this theme in detail. In "A Courtship," however, it only appears in the narrator's brief mention of the black people whom Ikkemotubbe brings with him when he returns to the plantation three years after the story's main events: the "eight new slaves which we did not need" (363), later referred to as "the eight more slaves which we had no use for" (379).

In "A Justice" Doom and the Chocktaws own a sizable number of black slaves. Four of them are briefly traded - along with the six slaves he has recently won on the steamboat from New Orleans - to two unnamed white men for the grounded riverboat which Doom then has moved by slaves to his plantation.

In "Red Leaves" these are the forty slaves who are sold by Issetibbeha to a Memphis trader. He uses the money to go to Europe.

The narrators of "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun note that the first slaves brought into Yoknapatawpha belonged to Grenier, a man better known as the Old Frenchman. The slaves who worked on his huge plantation before the Civil War appear, though tangentially, in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet.