Character Keys

None of these people are mentioned as individuals in The Town, but Gavin and Charles pay a visit to this community, where the local population was "having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181).

These workers begin remodeling Manfred de Spain's house after Flem purchases it in The Town. They are adding columns consistent with the stereotypical image of the antebellum mansion.

This entry represents the boys who appear or are referred to in various passages in The Town. For example, Mink Snopes called out from the jail to passing boys "he could trust would deliver his message" to Flem Snopes (85). "All the boys in town" appreciate Eck Snopes' goodness and the "raw peanuts" he is always willing to share with them (116). "All the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older" enjoy stealing watermelons from Ab Snopes' patch, then watching him rage about the loss (138).

In The Town the bank's board of directors meets during the Byron Snopes embezzlement crisis. In The Mansion they appear more obliquely, when Flem claims he has to confer with the bank director's before taking over the mortage on the Compson property.

In The Town Charles explains the origins of Yoknapatawpha's white population's basic moral code by referring to the past. Their ancestors, he says, "hadn't quitted home and security for a wilderness in which to find freedom of thought as they claimed and oh yes, believed, but to find freedom in which to be incorrigible and unreconstructible Baptists and Methodists; not to escape from tyranny as they claimed and believed, but to establish one" (321).

These are the people referred to in The Town as "somebody with an automobile" (71), a small but growing group of Yoknapatawpha residents during the period in which the novel is set. They bail Jabbo out of jail whenever one of them has a car that needs fixing.

Jefferson is governed by an elected Board of Aldermen as well as a Mayor. This unnamed alderman in The Town is the one who responds to Gavin Stevens' request that the town drain the water tank to find the brass Flem has stolen by saying, "I don’t know how much it will cost to drain that tank, but I for one will be damned - " before Gavin cuts him off (89). (See also Unnamed Board of Aldermen in this index.)

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.

The Oxford, Mississippi, lawyer with whom Linda consults while attending the University of Mississippi is named Stone in The Town. At her request, he devises a "contingency" by which Linda stipulates that Flem Snopes should receive any inheritance she is left by her mother. "He was very nice," Linda says (342). (He is mentioned but not named in The Mansion.) The real person behind this character is unquestionably Oxford resident Phil Stone, a lawyer and a descendant of a prominent local family.

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott is the second grade teacher who encourages and advises Wallstreet Panic Snopes throughout his public school education and beyond. She is a descendant of an old Yoknapatawpha family, but after teaching in Jefferson for a decade she decides "to accept a position in a school in Bristol, Virginia" (154). It would seem likely that she and the Doctor Wyott who runs the Academy that his grandfather founded must be related. Both these descendants of generations in Yoknapatawpha share a common interest in eduction.

Miss Wyott is a teacher in Jefferson in The Town, but the narrative notes that her "own people" - that is, her ancestors - "had come from the country (her own branch of it remained there where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson)" (154). (In The Reivers Faulkner re-names the family that owns this spot Wylie.)

In The Town Mr. Wildermark owns a store on Courthouse Square and orders "men's shoes which buttoned, with toes like small tulip bulbs, of an archaic and obsolete pattern," for Miss Mannie Hait once a year (244).

In The Town Mr. Widrington is a newcomer to Jefferson who drives his wife and her pedigree dog around town in a Cadillac.

In The Town Whit Rouncewell first appears when he tries to find the town's night marshal Grover Cleveland Winbush after seeing "them two fellows in Christian's drug store" (169). He is probably a relative of Mrs. Rouncewell, perhaps her son; he is definitely a contemporary of Linda Snopes: later in the novel, he is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He appears again in The Mansion, the next and last book in the Snopes trilogy.

In The Town this woman is the wife of the highway engineer who moves to Jefferson, where they discover that their second grade son has polio.

She is the wife of the original Vladimir Kyrilytch and mother of the second. She is the daughter of a Virginia farmer who hid and fed the Russian-born mercenary soldier when he escaped from an American prison during the Revolutionary War. At some point they married, and began the line of "V.K."s that culminates in the character readers meet frequently in the fictions. As her story is told in The Townand repeated in The Mansion, her maiden name was Ratcliffe, and the couple adopted it as their married name. Over time, the "c" and "e" were dropped from the spelling.

In The Town Sally Priest's husband, Maurice, fights with Grenier Weddel and blacks one of his eyes for sending his wife "not just what Father called a standard panic-size corsage, but a triple one" (81). Then, at home, Maurice Priest blackens his wife's eye. (The Maury Priest who appears in The Reivers is apparently a different character.)

In The Town Cedric is the son of Mrs. Nunnery and about five years old. After he goes off to play in a culvert, the search for him results in Eck Snopes' accidental death. Cedric himself returns unscathed.

Matt Levitt won the Golden Gloves boxing competition "up in Ohio or somewhere last year," according to Charles Mallison in The Town (192). Gavin says, "He graduated from that new Ford mechanic's school and the company sent him here to be a mechanic in the agency garage" (192). Levitt owns a yellow cut-down racer, and Linda rides in it with him. He and Gavin, for a time, are rivals for Linda's attention. After Matt bloodies Gavin's face and has a violent altercation with Anse McCallum, the sheriff runs him out of Jefferson.

In The Town, Mr. Kneeland owns the tailor shop in Jefferson, where he makes men's clothes and rents out formal menswear, such as the tuxedos worn to the Cotillion Club ball.

In The Town Ashley Holcomb is one the boys in the Harrykin Creek hunting party.

In The Town W.C. Handy, the famous Negro band leader and composer "from Beale Street in Memphis," provides the music for the Cotillion Ball (76). In the larger canon, Handy also provided Faulkner with the title of the short story "That Evening Sun" (1931) - one of Handy's most famous songs is "St. Louis Blues" (1914), which begins "I hate to see that evening sun go down." The novel calls him "Professor Handy" (76); Handy called himself, and has often been called by others, 'the Father of the Blues.'

In The Town Jabbo Gatewood is the son of Uncle Noon Gatewood, who as a blacksmith shod horses. In a sign of social change, Jabbo becomes an automobile mechanic: "Jabbo was the best mechanic in the county and although he still got drunk and into jail as much as ever, he never stayed longer than just overnight anymore because somebody with an automobile always needed him to pay his fine by morning" (71).

In The Town Mr. Garraway owns the store at Seminary Hill. Gavin Stevens describes him physically as "an old man with an old man's dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles" (328).

Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," The Town doesn't mention the fact.)

Jack Crenshaw is "the Revenue field agent that did the moonshine still hunting in our district" who calls the sheriff about Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio in The Town (182).

Walter is Willy Christian's janitor in The Town. "His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167). He and Willy have a lot in common, according to Charles Mallison, except that "if anything Walter was a little more irascible," and instead of morphine, Walter has a weakness for the store's "medicinal alcohol" (167).

Ephriam Bishop is the county sheriff in The Mansion when Mink is released from prison. He and Hub Hampton alternate being Sheriff every four years. (In The Town one of Linda Snopes' suitors is referred to as "the youngest Bishop" boy, but neither novel makes any connection between these two Bishops.)

Preacher Birdsong is a World War I veteran who "learned to box in France in the war" (192). He "lives out in the country," and likely is connected to the Birdsong family in Frenchman's Bend that appears in two other texts - but that's not made explicit. "Preacher" is his name, not a job title. Charles Mallison has seen him boxing with Matt Levitt.

In The Town Theron is the youngest son of Mayor Adams and Eve Adams; he declines Manfred de Spain's challenge to fight him.

The mother of Theron Adams in The Town is the "old fat wife" of Mayor Adams (11). To the younger people in Jefferson, she and her aged husband are disparagingly called Adam and "Miss Eve Adam" - a "fat old Eve" too old to tempt or be tempted (11).

The sister of Devries in "By the People" and The Mansion is, like her brother, not from Yoknapatawpha but a county further east; she comes to the picnic at Varner's Mill to watch her brother announce his candidacy, bringing her twin sons with her.

These are the two different groups of "Negro troops" who serve in the U.S. Army in World War II and Korea that Devries commands in "By the People" (134). When Faulkner has the story's narrator say that in Korea, Devries "commands troops containing Negroes" rather than "Negro troops," as in the earlier war (134), he may be acknowledging the actual, slow history of racial integration in the military. World War II was the first time the U.S. Army allowed blacks to serve in combat, but kept them in segregated units that were commanded, as the narrator notes, by white officers.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this soldier, "a hulking giant of an Arkansas Negro cotton-field hand" in civilian life (134, 339), heroically rescues Devries and a sergeant by carrying them both away from enemy fire. Devries (unofficially) recognizes his heroism by pinning one of his own medals on the man. We can hear affection and admiration in Devries' voice when he addresses the man who saved him as "you big bastard"; the narrator's tone when he persists in calling this soldier a "field hand" is harder to interpret (134, 340).

Like the Ku Klux Klan, the next organization that Clarence Snopes joins in "By the People" and The Mansion - "Silver Shirts" - was a real white supremacist, antisemitic organization (131, 334). Its official name was the Silver Legion of America, but its nickname acknowledges its ideological indebtedness to Brown Shirts in Germany, the fascist group that helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power in the 1930s. It was founded in North Carolina in early 1933.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion, during his youth in Frenchman's Bend Clarence Snopes is the leader of a "gang of cousins and toadies" (89, 328) who terrorize the community around Frenchman's Bend. They fought and drank and beat Negroes and terrified young girls" (89) - slightly revised to "fought and drank and gambled and beat up Negroes and terrified women and young girls" in the novel (328).

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion these are the "young girls" who are "terrified" by the gang that Clarence Snopes leads (89, 328).

This army officer - referred to as the "exec" in Devries' unit in Korea in "By the People" (134) and as the "second" in Devries' unit on a World War II battlefield in The Mansion (339) - is the executive officer who is second in command of the Negro combat unit that Devries commands. It's likely Faulkner imagined him as 'white': historically, as an officer, he would definitely have been white during World War II, and probably white in the Korean War.

In "By the People" she serves in a field hospital in Korea, and helps Devries reward the soldier who saved him on the battlefield. In The Mansion she performs the same action in a field hospital somewhere else, during World War II.

According to the narrator of "By the People," the compact organs manufactured by "the Remish Musical Company of South Bend, Indiana," were so popular with the country folk in Frenchman's Bend that in time "boy children from that section were bearing into puberty and even manhood Remish as their Christian names" (87). The narrator of this story is not noticeably facetious, and Faulkner's country people in other stories name their children things like "Montgomery Ward," so there's no reason to think this is just a joke.

The narrator of "Race at Morning" calls the man with whom his mother ran off "two years ago" a "Vicksburg roadhouse feller" (307). "Roadhouse" is a dialect term for an inn or tavern on the side of a road. This man may have worked there, or perhaps the phrase just means the roadhouse is where he and "maw" met (307).

These generic game wardens - the state officers who supervise the start and ending of the deer hunting season in Mississippi - are noted briefly, only once, by the unnamed narrator of "Race at Morning."

The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his father "pap" (307). He leaves his son behind when he leaves the tenant cabin he lives on at Mister Ernest's place, presumably to search for his wife, who has herself run off with a "durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake" (308). He never returns for his son.

According to the twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" Mister Ernest "wasn't jest a planter; he was a farmer" too - which means he worked on his land along with "his hands and tenants" (308). He raises "cotton and oats and beans and hay" (309) at Van Dorn, his estate somewhere close to the wilderness in which the hunt takes place. A widower, he adopts the unnamed narrator when the child's parents - tenant farmers on his land - abandon him. Mister Ernest goes deer hunting each November with a party of men from Yoknapatawpha.

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).

The "childless wife" of the bank cashier who beats Nancy is only mentioned in Requiem for a Nun.

"The U.D.C. ladies" who "instigated and bought" the Confederate statue that stands at the center of Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun are members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of Southern women that was founded in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee (188). Members actively served the 'Lost Cause' of the Old South and the Confederacy by sponsoring the construction of monuments, lobbying boards of education, and so on.

One of the "three Frenchmen" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun traveling down the Mississippi River in "a Chippeway canoe" is almost certainly René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the 17th-century French explorer credited with discovering the river and claiming it and all the territory it drained for France (81). But it's not clear why Faulkner associates him specifically with two other Frenchmen. The actual party of Frenchmen and French-Canadians who, along with a group of Canadian Indians, traveled downriver to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682-1683 was much larger.

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).