Character Keys

Littlejohn is one of the neighbors present at the Bundren farm after Addie's death. He is also the man who told Armstid that the flood washed out the main road to Jefferson.

In "A Courtship," Log-in-the-Creek is the only one of the Chickasaw young men who does not stop courting Herman Basket's sister after Ikkemotubbe's interest in her becomes known. His unheroic name seems to fit his apparently negligible character: he cannot hold his liquor, and he "raced no horses and fought no cocks and cast no dice" (364).

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon Quick and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. Nor is it absolutely clear how to disambiguate Lon Sr. and his son Lon Jr., or as they are sometimes referred to by other inhabitants of the Bend, "Big Lon" and "Little Lon." This entry is Lon Junior's, who appears in three texts altogether.

The "defunct husband" of Mrs. Hait - called simply Hait in "Mule in the Yard" (252) and Lonzo Hait in The Town - was helping I.O. Snopes cheat the insurance company when he (along with a string of I.O.'s mules) was killed in a train accident on a blind curve next to his house in Jefferson. According to what his widow says to I.O. in both texts, "you paid him fifty dollars a trip each time he got mules in front of the train in time" (262, 262).

In The Sound and the Fury Lorraine is the woman Jason is seeing in Memphis, Tennessee. In the letter she sends him, she calls Jason "my sweet daddy" (193). Their relationship seems based on the money he gives her and the sex she gives him. Jason thinks of her as "a good honest whore" (233). His ideas about other people, especially women, are hardly reliable, but in this case it does seem likely that Lorraine is one of the many Memphis prostitutes in Faulkner's fiction.

In "Red Leaves" Louis Berry is one of the Indians who leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - a task which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. Louis is described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313).

In The Sound and the Fury Louis Hatcher is an elderly black man who goes possum hunting with Quentin and Versh on a windless October night. Thinking of him, Quentin notes that he "never even used his [hunting] horn carrying it" (114). He does use the lantern he carries, but the last time he cleaned it, he tells Quentin, was during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; he and his wife Martha were afraid the flood waters would reach Yoknapatawpha. It is possible but very unlikely that he is the "Louis" who teaches Caddy how to drive a car (93).

In "That Will Be Fine," the narrator's cousin Louisa is the young daughter of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

This sister of Rosa Millard appears or is mentioned in three of the Unvanquished stories. When she first appears, in "Raid," she is named "Louise"; her husband and son have both been killed in the Civil War, and the large Dennison plantation has been burned by the Yankees. Louise tries, ineffectually, to keep her daughter Drusilla from helping Rosa conduct her non-military raid on the Union troops in the area.

In Light in August, Lucas Burch is "tall, young. Dark complected" (55). One of the "sawdust Casanovas" among the Doane's Mill workers, Lucas Burch impregnates and deserts Lena Grove in Alabama (6). He finds his way to Jefferson, where, unimaginatively changing his name to "Joe Brown," he takes a menial job in the planing mill, but he quits to join Christmas as partner in a bootleg whiskey business.

First introduced into the canon as Lucius (Luke) Provine in the short story "A Bear Hunt" (1934), where he is a major character, he recurs in the last two novels in the Snopes trilogy and The Reivers as Lucius Hogganbeck. As Provine, he is forty years old and almost toothless, a hanger-on at the hunting camp, a "tall, apparently strong and healthy man . . . who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64), as well as violent, shiftless and boozy.

Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.

In The Reivers, his last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).

Like her husband, Mrs. Houston is mentioned in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Her story is essentially the same: within a year of their marriage, she is killed by his horse, a dangerous stallion. But her maiden name changes, from Lucy Pate (in The Hamlet) to Letty Bookright (in The Town), as does the brief biography provided in those first two volumes, and as do the details of her death. She comes into focus most vividly in The Hamlet. Her essential role in the trilogy is to be the reason why Houston is a widower.

Minnie's former husband in Sanctuary - the first text in which she appears - is described as a "cook in a restaurant" who "didn't approve of Minnie's business" as a maid in a brothel, so he took everything he could from her and "went off with a waitress in the restaurant" (209-10). Minnie sounds glad to be rid of him. The husband referred to in The Mansion is named Ludus - and while he too steals Minnie's money, he also beats her savagely (89); although he's currently in prison, it's not clear that Minnie is rid of him.

According to The Hamlet, this member of the Snopes family was under indictment for stealing a "drummer's sample-case of shoes, all of the right foot" (218) when he married a schoolteacher and fathered one son with her before her untimely death.

Described in The Hamlet as a "thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat," Lump's mother grew up in a large family plagued by "a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies" (218). Despite her desire to better herself through education and teaching, she married a "man under indictment" and gave birth to a son that she named after the Arthurian knight Launcelot as an act of "quenchless defiance" against the grim circumstances of her life. She died soon after.

The Luster in The Reivers works in the livery stable, though his specific job is not made clear. (There's no suggestion that this Luster is the same person who works for the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.)

In The Reivers Lycurgus is "a pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen" (162), and the grandson of Uncle Parsham Hood. Hood's daughter Mary is his mother; the narrative never mentions the man named Briggins who is his father. A very polite young man, he even refers to Ned as "Mr. McCaslin," confusing Lucius, who obviously assumes he must be speaking about a white man (222).

In As I Lay Dying "Mr. Gillespie's boy" Mack helps his father and the Bundrens move Addie's coffin into the barn, and then later works to help save the Gillespies' livestock from the fire in the barn (216). During the fireVardaman notes that his legs "fuzz" in the moonlight (216).

The historical Madame de Pompadour who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" was the primary mistress of Louis XV, an 18th century King of France. Issetibbeha returns home from France with some furniture reputedly owned by Louis XV.

Margaret (Maggie) Mallison is Judge Stevens' daughter, Gavin's twin sister, Charles Mallison's wife and Chick's mother. The role she plays in the six late fictions in which she appears or is mentioned is largely defined by her relationship to these male figures, especially to her son, toward whom she is unfailingly protective despite his own restiveness with her concerns. She is well-educated, within the limits defined by her gender and her caste: she attended the Jefferson Female Academy, where she met and became friends with the woman whom Gavin would eventually marry.

Intruder in the Dust refers often to both the extended Gowrie clan and the larger white population of Beat Four as a specific sociological entity. The phrase "Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts" identifies the three largest familial groups in that area of Yoknapatawpha (28), though members of these families have intermarried repeatedly over the generations too. (Twice the novel adds "Frasers" to this list of names, 145, 146; another time it adds "McCallums," 33).

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 "Centaur in Brass" the mayor of Jefferson who is reportedly having an affair with Mrs. Flem Snopes is named Hoxey; according to town gossip, this affair account's for "her husband's rise in Hoxey's administration" (151). Hoxey is described the town's "lone rich middle-aged bachelor" and "a graduate of Yale" (151). His relationship with Mrs. Snopes clearly prefigures Eula Snopes' and Mayor Manfred de Spain's affair in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

The "Malbrouck" who is mentioned in "Barn Burning" is a real historical figure named John Churchill; "Malbrouck" is a corruption of Churchill's title as First Duke of Malborough. Between the 1670s and his death in 1722, Churchill rose from the rank of page to become one of the most influential generals and statesmen in English history. While serving five English monarchs, he never neglected his own ambitions for power and wealth.

In Light in August Mame is a big, brass-haired woman. During the day she sits "like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield," behind a cigar case near the front of the dingy restaurant where Christmas meets Bobbie (175). At night she is the madam of the small town brothel which she runs with her husband.

Mandy cooks for Grandpa in "That Will Be Fine," but she seems to have disappeared the day before Christmas, missing her duties as cook and leaving her cabin mysteriously "locked on the inside" (274).

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).

Maw Grier's brother Marsh fought and was wounded in World War I. For Mrs. Grier in "Two Soldiers," her brother's decision to enlist in 1917 gives her a way to appreciate why in 1941 her oldest son Pete has "got to go" to the another war. For Mr. Grier, however, Marsh's "actual wound on the battlefields of France" means the family has already contributed "enough" to U.S. war efforts (85). Mrs. Grier mentions her brother again in "Shall Not Perish."

Martha is the wife of Louis Hatcher in The Sound and the Fury. He tells Quentin that his wife was afraid the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania could reach Mississippi.

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).

Led by Samuel Ross Mason, a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, "Mason's ruffians" were a gang of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in the Mississippi Valley frontier in the late 18th century. Both the first-person narrator of "A Name for the City" and the omniscient third-person narrator of Requiem for a Nun reject the idea that the unnamed bandits who were briefly held in the settlement jail were part of this gang, because - as Requiem puts it - "even the last of Mason's ruffians were dead or scattered by this time" (5).

The narrator of "Hair" says Matt Fox, a barber at Maxey's barber shop, "knew more about Hawkshaw than Maxey" (133), which surprises the narrator because Matt does not talk much. Matt is also married and described as a "fat, flabby fellow, with a pasty face and eyes that looked tired or sad something" (133). He is "funny" and "almost as good a barber as Hawkshaw" (133).

One of the four men - the others are Ike, Pose, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters."

In The Sound and the Fury Maury Bascomb is the brother of Caroline Bascomb Compson. For much of the Compson children's early life he lives in their home and regularly partakes of their father's whiskey; by 1928 he has moved away, but continues regularly to ask his sister for money. Benjy was originally named "Maury" in his honor. He also has an affair with the Compsons' next door neighbor, Mrs. Patterson. When the affair is revealed, Mr. Patterson beats Uncle Maury - or as Benjy puts it, "His eye was sick, and his mouth" (43).

The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).

In "Knight's Gambit," the one text in which he has a significant presence, Max Harriss is the twenty-one-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss (nee Melisandre Backus). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192). As a son he takes after his gangster father; in a sense, the eyes have it: despite his "delicate face," there is "nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). Max is the older of "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148).

In "Pantaloon in Black" the country sheriff who arrests Rider is named Mayfield; in Go Down, Moses, his name is changed to Maydew; when Rider's story is retold by Temple in Requiem for a Nun the sheriff is not named. In the first two texts, only his name is changed. In both he tells Rider that "You'll have plenty of fresh air when [the Birdsongs] get ahold of you" (254, 150).

Hoake McCarron's father makes a dashing figure in The Hamlet: a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman.

In Light in August McKinley Grove brings his twelve-year-old sister Lena to live with his family in Doane's Mill, Alabama, after the death of their parents. He is "just forty" years old and "twenty years her senior" (5), which gives him a birth date in 1892. "He was a hard man": when his wife tells him that Lena is pregnant, he "calls her whore," (6), after which Lena leaves Doane's Mill in search of her baby's father.

The young black who rides Acheron against Lucius and Lightning in The Reivers is named McWillie. According to Lucius, "for size and age and color [he] might have been Lycurgus' twin" (220).

Melissa Hogganbeck is a history teacher at the Jefferson Academy that Charles Mallison attends in "Knight's Gambit." Her "tireless cultured educated 'lady's' voice" makes it hard for him to endure the class which she "now called World Affairs with capitals on both” (209). She also teaches American History before 1865 at "the Academy" to Linda Snopes in The Town (301). If either she or her grandfather, who is also mentioned in the novel, are related to Boon Hogganbeck, who appears in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, the texts give no hint of it.

First described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as a "young light negress" (27), Meloney is later referred to by Jenny Du Pre as a "mulatto girl" (394). She is Belle Mitchell's servant when the novel begins, but soon goes into business for herself as a beautician with the money that Simon embezzles from the Second Baptist Church. At the end of the novel Simon is found murdered in her cabin.

Mike is presumably the owner of the Boston gym where Gerald Bland has been learning to box. In The Sound and the Fury Shreve tells Spoade that Bland has "been going to Mike's every day, over in town" (166).

First mentioned but not named by Will Falls in Flags in the Dust when he mentions that Bayard's two sisters went to stay with his "gran'pappy" in Memphis during the Civil War (20), he comes into a little more focus in "My Grandmother Millard" when Bayard notes that his grandmother's dead husband owned a "supply house" in Memphis (688). One of his customers was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who (although the story never mentions it) was a well-known Memphis planter and slave-dealer at that time.

Milly Jones appears in both "Wash" and Absalom! as the poor white and illegitimate grandaughter of Wash, who is described in the novel's "Genealogy" as a "hanger-on of Sutpen" (308). She is "eight-years-old" when first mentioned in the short story, and an "infant" when first mentioned in the novel (536, 99). In both texts she is "a fifteen-year-old gal," as Wash puts it in the story, when Sutpen begins a kind of courtship of her, and "already mature [i.e. sexually], after the early way of her kind" (541).

In The Sound and the Fury Mink works at the livery stable in Jefferson. Based on characters with similar jobs in the other fictions, he is most likely black, but that is not specified. He drives the hack, the rented carriage, that the Compsons rent for Mr. Compson's funeral, and then, in exchange for a couple of cigars, drives it again so that Jason can show Caddy's child to her.