Character Keys

These are the enslaved people in "Wash" who call Wash "white trash behind his back" (536), and to his face pointedly ask him "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). When they do that, Wash can see their "white eyes and teeth behind which derision lurked" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).

When he returns to the Burden place after Lena's baby is born in Light in August, Hightower has a brief vision of the antebellum plantation that it once was, and in particular of "the rich fecund black life of the quarters," the "fecund [enslaved] women" and their "prolific naked children" (407).

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, the "Anglo-Saxon pioneer" (81) was followed by wealthier settlers who built the "river towns" like Vicksburg and Natchez, "men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats, who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds" (82). Included in this group is the first planter to grow cotton in the region - "someone brought a curious seed into the land . . . and now vast fields of white" covered the land (83).

Described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as "the General's body servant," this unnamed slave provides a kind of sound track to Aunt Jenny's story of Stuart and Carolina Bayard as "two angels valiantly fallen": he strums a "guitar in lingering random chords" at the Confederate unit's camp (12).

In "Red Leaves" Doom had a slave as a personal servant. At his death many years earlier, this unnamed slave also ran away to avoid being killed and buried with his master - but he too was pursued and captured.

In "Wash" this "house servant" - also called a "Negress" - is "one of the few Negroes who remained" at Sutpen's after the Sherman and the "Federal troops" had passed through (537). She refuses to allow Wash Jones to enter the Sutpen mansion while Sutpen is away at the war - not even by way of "the kitchen steps" (537). (Her treatment of Wash anticipates the character of Clytemnestra in Absalom, Absalom!, but there is no hint in the story that she is related to the white family she serves.)

This slave appears in the only scene in The Sound and the Fury from the time that the Compsons owned slaves - what Versh calls the "old time" (69). He appears in the story about Grandfather Compson and one of his slaves that Dilsey told Versh, as Versh repeats it to Benjy (who of course cannot understand it at all). According to the story, because Benjy's Grandfather changed the man's name (a common practice during slavery), the man became both a preacher and a "bluegum" (69).

In "Delta Autumn," this woman, Ike McCaslin's "dead wife's niece," lives in his house in Jefferson with her children and looks after him during the fifty weeks of the year he is not in the woods (274). In Go Down, Moses this same woman is called his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), but in the first mention of her, in the very beginning of the novel, she is "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" (6). Faulkner either mis-remembered the story when he wrote "sister" or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" later.

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."

The phrase the narrator of "A Courtship" uses to describe Herman Basket's sister - "she walks in beauty" - sounds faintly 'Indian' but is actually borrowed from Lord Byron (362). Or "sat in it, that is," he adds - which sounds pretty risque, though becomes less so when he adds that she doesn't walk at all "unless she had to" (362). Like Eula Varner in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, she is lazy and slovenly but exercises an irresistible power over all the men who see her. While she is at the center of the story's courtship plot, she does not actually speak a single word in it.

In "Red Leaves" Doom is described as "one of three children" (317), but the narrative does not say if his siblings are male or female.

As part of his fiction about loaning his car to a showman in The Sound and the Fury, Jason invents an adulterous "brother-in-law" involved with "some town woman" (258).

In The Sound and the Fury the old "man in a dirty apron" Jason spots at the train carrying the traveling show in Mottson is probably a cook. Though smaller than Jason, he becomes a "puny fury" when he feels Jason has insulted him, driving to get to his "butcher knife" and then attacking Jason with a "rusty hatchet" (309-10). As the owner of the show later tells Jason, warning him to stay away from the show, "That damn little wasp'll kill you" (312).

The "them" in the phrase "made them return her money" is the only reference in "Miss Zilphia Gant" to the people who own or work in the store where Mrs. Gant bought and then brought back a miniature cook stove (373).

The captain of the ship that carries Horace back to the U.S. in Flags in the Dust seems fairly phlegmatic: when Horace's glass-blowing starts a fire in his cabin on board, at least according to Horace's account, he "decides that I'd better not try it again" until the reach land (138).

In "Monk," the county sheriff is mentioned by negation, as a way to characterize the hill country in the eastern part of the county from which Monk hails: according to the narrator, the area is so dangerous to outsiders that not even the sheriff will go there. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

This sheriff is only mentioned in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as a story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished. After killing the two Burdens, John Sartoris tells his followers that he plans to find the sheriff and "make bond" (208). The office of Sheriff was different from the office of Marshal that is at stake in the election. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The county sheriff in "The Hound" is unnamed. He is described as "past middle-age," "a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt" who smokes a corn cob pipe (156). At first he seems more concerned with his "supper" than with investigating Houston's disappearance (158), but that seems at least in part a disguise. He figures out how to identify and capture the killer, and transports him to jail with both professional care and human respect, while making sure that they eat on the way and also will be "home for supper" on time (163).

The sheriff never appears in "Dry September," but is mentioned by Hawkshaw when he tries to prevent the lynching: "Let's get the sheriff and do this thing right" (172). (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions. Obviously in some of these cases - at least when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment - Faulkner may be thinking of the same unnamed character, or one of the half dozen "Sheriff Hampton"s who also appear in the fictions, but from the texts themselves there is no way to establish that.)

While the sheriff of Yoknapatawpha never appears in person in "Knight's Gambit," Robert Markey mentions him when he tells Gavin Stevens that "your sheriff will have to send someone" to help take Max Harriss into custody (232). Later Stevens mentions a different officer of the law when he instructs his nephew to send a message to the Memphis police that includes this phrase: "use police per request Jefferson chief if necessary” (214). While the county sheriff is a familiar character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, there is no other mention in them of a "chief" of police.

The unnamed county sheriff who appears in "A Point of Law" is not described in any detail. In the companion short story "Gold Is Not Always," the sheriff is only mentioned. When Faulkner combined these stories into the chapter in Go Down, Moses called "The Fire and the Hearth," he describes the sheriff who plays the same roles as "a tremendous man, fat" (62). We assume these are all the same character in Faulkner's imagination.

The county sheriff in The Sound and the Fury is a man with "vigorous untidy iron-gray hair and his gray eyes were round and shiny like a little boy's" (301-02). He exercises his judgment - about Jason Compson in particular - when he refuses to help Jason chase after his niece on Easter Sunday. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute.

The man whom Mrs. Hightower meets in a Memphis hotel in Light in August is drunk when he registers under a fictitious name as her husband. It is not clear if she had ever met him on any of her earlier trips to Memphis, nor what role he might have played in her death there, but the narrative says that "he was arrested" (67).

At the wedding reception in Kohl's studio apartment in The Mansion, Ratliff notes the "two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne," but adds that "three or four" of the guests were "helping too" (191).

In Absalom! the two "house servants" who work for Goodhue Coldfield (14), "both women" (42), were legally slaves when he first "came into possession of them" - "through a debt," Mr. Compson says, "not purchase" (66). He "frees" them immediately, but does not give them "their papers of freedom"; instead, he credits the "weekly wage" they earn but don't receive toward their "market value" as slaves, forcing them to work toward their freedom (66). They are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66).

In "The Tall Men," when Buddy McCallum thinks that his sons are being called up for active duty in wartime, he tells them to obey their "sergeants and officers," adding, "The Government done right by me in my day, and it will do right by you" (53).

When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives.

The second group of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are encountered at the river in Alabama; Drusilla, Rosa, Bayard and Ringo have to move through a huge crowd that is trying to reach the Union army on the other side. It consists of "men carrying babies, women dragging children by the hand, and women with babies, and old ones pulling themselves along with sticks" (48). They are being held away from the bridge by the Union cavalry.

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this character is carrying "a baby, a few months old" when the party from Sartoris meets her on the road. She is escaping the plantation where she had been enslaved, hoping to reach the Union Army as it moves through Mississippi, and has fallen behind the others in group of former slaves she had been traveling with (Raid, 41).

In "Lion" Major de Spain "calls" this secretary to send a telegram to Boon (198). The secretary does not make an explicit appearance, and may be either male or female.

The title character of "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns from a newspaper about this woman "in another state" who marries the man to whom she herself had been married (379); from the detective agency she hires, Zilphia learns about "the birth of a daughter and of the mother's death," a sequence that suggests this woman died in childbirth (381). Although from the agency's reports Zilphia learns enough about this woman's marriage to live "vicariously" inside it (380), what the story passes on to readers is vague and confusing.

Identified in Flags in the Dust only as "young," "American," and an "employee of the Standard oil company," he and Joan Heppleton are married for one year, presumably living in Calcutta where she meets him (321). At the end of that time they are divorced.

The "second cousin" of Herman Basket's aunt is also the "grand-niece of the wife of old David Colbert" (363, 365). She does not appear in "A Courtship," but the "silver wine pitcher" she bequeathed her second cousin does (363).

In Flags in the Dust this man and Colonel Sartoris met while they were both servng in the Mexican War. After the Civil War, Sartoris brings him to Yoknapatawpha to help with the building of the railroad. He seems bemused by Jenny Du Pre's story about "Carolina" Bayard in the one scene in which he appears.

In The Hamlet the "old man" who runs the Frenchman's Bend school before Labove is referred to only as "the Professor" (113). "Bibulous by nature," as an educator he has no control over the classroom and gets no respect from the students (113).

In Intruder in the Dust this superintendent of the schools in Jefferson calls Gavin Stevens to ask whether to have school on Monday.

In "Hair" various school girls, with Susan Reed among them, pass the barber shop every morning and afternoon on their way to and from school.

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Quentin tells Jason she needs money to pay back "a girl. I borrowed some money from a girl" (214). It seems more likely, however, that the money is for an abortion, and that this "girl" is her invention.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the one girl whom Zilphia has permission to visit and play with after school is not named or described, but after the two girls have grown up the narrative mentions her marriage (Zilphia herself makes the bride's "white gown," 374), and, after another four years, the birth of her first child, a daughter (for whom Zilphia makes dresses).

In "Monk" the "country school" that Monk attends as a first-grader almost certainly was a one-room schoolhouse, and his schoolmates probably ranged in age from six to sixteen or so (48). But when Monk describes his experience there, he tells Gavin that "they [the students] would all read together out of the books," and that, although he was illiterate, "it was fine . . . to hear all the voices together," including his (48).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's grotesque childhood is set against the normal lives of other Jefferson children, "all the boys and girls" who go to school (372) and who run, for example, "with random shouts back and forth at recess" (371). As they grow up, these children "fall into inevitable pairs," courting and marrying (374).

In Flags in the Dust Bayard and Raf are passed by "small groups [of] children going home from school" for lunch at noon, and three hours later they again "walk among school children" going home at the end of the school day (119, 126). These children are described as "little girls with colored boxes and skipping ropes" and "boys in various stages of deshabille" (119).

In Intruder in the Dust the crew who work in the sawmill where trees from Sudley Workitt's land are turned into lumber are "hired by the day" (219). They are almost certainly not the same men as the "three youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" (18). The two sawmills are close enough in space, but not in time: that earlier group appears three years before the Gowrie's begin harvesting Workitt's timber.

In The Hamlet these "people" are obliquely evoked when the narrator says that the "mounds of rotting sawdust" marking the sites of the sawmills that once turned all the trees around Frenchman's Bend into lumber are the "monuments of a people's heedless greed" (190).

In The Mansion this "Four-F potato chip salesman" ran off with Mrs. Goodyhay while Goodyhay himself was serving in World War II (294).

In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112).

The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Among the various kinds of jailed prisoners mentioned in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are "runaway slaves who were captured in the settlement" (202, 6). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story does not say where these slaves escaped from. Instead, it notes that the "single wooden bar" across the door of the jail effectively keeps them from escaping again (202, 6).