Character Keys

In his sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog refers to the Romans who hunt for the newborn Jesus as both the "po-lice" and as "sojers" (296).

One of the men Colonel Sartoris kills in Flags in the Dust is called "that robber" by Will Fall; the context suggests he was trying to rob the money Sartoris carried as he was building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha. (This character and "that other feller" Sartoris kills in this novel seem combined into the character of the unnamed "hill man" in The Unvanquished, 23.)

In Sanctuary, the woman who owns the limousine in which Popeye's grandmother leaves him becomes a kind of godmother to the child, making sure Popeye gets medical attention and often bringing him "to her home in afternoons and for holidays" (308). The narrative does not explain her motives in trying to help, but does show how they come to grief when her attempt to give him a birthday party is defeated by his violent antisocial behavior. Even after Popeye is sent to "a home for incorrigible children" (309), this woman continues to help Popeye's mother support herself (309).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the "revenue officers and deputies" whom Lucas remembers worked for the U.S. government (215, 61). Selling or buying alcohol was illegal by Mississippi state law, but in general the moonshiners who made and sold whiskey were prosecuted for evading federal tax regulations.

Jack Crenshaw and this man whom The Town does not name are federal officers, "revenue field agents" (182), who "are just interested in whiskey, not photography" (183). They find the moonshine whiskey in Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio. (As officials whose task it is to make sure all alcohol production is properly taxed, 'revenuers' play a prominent role in the lore of moonshine whiskey.)

The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184).

Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222).

In The Town there are "half a dozen strangers not even kin to Snopeses by marriage" who are eating in the restaurant when Eck asks about what is really in the hamburgers he's cooking (34).

Although the narrator of "Centaur in Brass" says that "we" often saw Mrs. Snopes working in her husband's restaurant, he later suggests that most of the customers there were men from the surrounding countryside. Major Hoxey eats there, but he looks out of place "among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces" of the other diners (151).

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).

In Flags in the Dust Will Falls distributes the "pint of whisky" that is always part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas gift baskets given him by the Sartorises "among his ancient and homeless cronies" (301) in the county poorhouse.

Sanctuary describes the people who live in "the restricted district" of Memphis through which Red's funeral procession passes in terms of their "faces," which "peer from beneath lowered shades" as it goes by (249). While it is not absolutely clear what "restricted district" refers to, the point of this passage seems to be to juxtapose two worlds in Memphis: the underworld and the respectable (but intimidated) citizenry.

Flags in the Dust characterizes the residents of Horace's new 'home' town - where he is clearly in exile - negatively. They have turned a Mississippi hamlet into a prosperous but squalid town. The engine of its economy is a factory making an unspecified product from the local cypress trees, which are all being chopped down. The narrator labels this populace with a series of pejorative terms, including "brigands" and "bugs" (373).

These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers.

In The Hamlet the orphaned Lucy Pate was raised by this remote relation; she imbued Lucy with the "domestic skill" of a "country heritage" and the values of "constancy and devotion" (227).

Hightower's wife in Light in August is the only child of "one of the ministers, the teachers" in the seminary he attends (479), but this icon represents the imaginary "family" that Hightower invents to explain his wife's periodical absences in Memphis. He tells the congregation she has gone to visit them "downstate somewhere" (63).

The reference to this character|these characters in The Mansion is a good example of how hard it is to create data entries for many of the inhabitants of Faulkner's imaginative world. As part of the novel's description of Jake Wattman's moonshine operation, the narrator refers to the "recurrent new reform-administration sheriff" in Yoknapatawpha who hopes to raid it (244). "Sheriff" is singular. "Recurrent," however, suggests more than one sheriff.

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for causing the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the wildcat manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites" (273).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished there is a large group of Negroes who sought freedom with the Union army but who are turned over to Rosa Millard because of a clerical error. They are part of a much larger group of self-emancipated slaves, to Bayard it "looks like a thousand" (52, 110), who are waiting beside the pile of confiscated chests and the pen full of confiscated mules when Rosa Millard presents the faulty requisition order that calls for "110 Negroes of both sexes" to be "repossessed" to her (54, 112).

In The Unvanquished Bayard twice mentions the "workmen" (225) who build Colonel Sartoris' railroad line to Jefferson. He pays them on "Saturdays" (220).

The "lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh" to whom, at the end of Flags in the Dust, Horace gives the letter he has written to Narcissa back in Jefferson (374).

The flagman who helps Doc and Mrs. Hines into the vestibule at the railroad station in Light in August is not described.

In The Mansion Mink sees this engineer "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39).

This is the train brakeman in "Monk" who sees an accomplice help Bill Terrel carry a body through the bushes and "fling it under the train" (59). Although he's clearly observant, the brakeman could not tell if the victim was dead or alive at the time.

This is the "express clerk" at the Jefferson railroad station in "Knight's Gambit" (255).

In Flags in the Dust this is the employee inside the train's baggage car. His race is not specified, and his reply to Horace's concern about the fragility of his glass blowing equipment makes it hard to determine it. Linguistically he sounds 'black': "All right, colonel. . . . we ain't hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us" (157). But his unsubmissive attitude toward the white Horace suggests he is 'white' himself.

The "steward and marshal" at the races in The Reivers is a local "dog trainer" and hunter who is out on bail awaiting trial for "a homicide which had occurred last winter at a neighboring whiskey still" (229).

In "All the Dead Pilots," Sartoris and Spoomer, enemies in love, both belong to the same Royal Air Force unit, identified only as the "-- Squadron" in Kaye's letter to Aunt Jenny (530). The "whole squadron" is referred to several times by the narrator, also a member of the unit, but it is never made explicit how many men and planes this adds up to (521). (By 1918 there were 150 squadrons in the R.A.F.)

The owner of the logging camp where Mink works in The Hamlet "lives openly" with a quadroon woman "most of whose teeth were gold" and who superintends the kitchen (262). (The term 'quadroon' appears in a lot of American literature before the Civil Rights movement; it was used to label a person with three white and one black grandparents. Faulkner scholarship uses the term to identify the woman in Absalom, Absalom! with whom Charles Bon has a child, but we identify her in this index as Mrs. Charles Bon.)

When "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns that her former husband has married again "in a neighboring state," she travels to Memphis to engage a "private detective agency" to surveil him and his new wife. The story does not describe any of the individual detectives, but the agency sends her detailed accounts in weekly letters. (The history of American private detective agencies dates back to Allen Pinkerton, who started his National Detective Agency in 1850.)

These are the other captured U.S. and Allied servicemen in The Mansion with whom Charles Mallison is confined in a German "POW camp at Limbourg" during the Second World War (323).

In "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Gavin Stevens calls the warden at the penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, to gather information about Samuel Beauchamp.

These are the prison workers in both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses who are in charge of Samuel Beauchamp's execution: the "armed guard" who stands outside his cell and the penitentiary officials who enter the cell and prepare Beauchamp for his execution (256, 351).

In The Sound and the Fury this man works in the town's printing shop. He advises Jason as to where he might find old checks from a defunct bank.

The man the American M.P. in "Ad Astra" refers to simply as "your president" when he's arguing with the French officer is Raymond Poincare, who was President of France during World War I.

According to The Town, the members of the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian churches in Jefferson constitute the two oldest congregations in the county, dating from "before the county was a County and Jefferson was Jefferson" (321).

The ministers in Jefferson, all of whom are Protestants, resent Eula for her open infidelity. Later in The Mansion, however, the town's "white ministers" cannot find a reason to "go on record against" Linda Snopes Kohl's work as a Sunday school teacher at "one of the Negro churches" (254).

In the immediate aftermath of the South's surrender, according to Rosa's account in Absalom!, "men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns"; a deputation from this group unsuccessfully demands that Sutpen join them (130). Rosa never gives the group a name, but when she later describes their "sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses" it seems obvious that the Ku Klux Klan is being evoked (134). (There are entries for Klansmen in other texts in this index.)

The man who works as a clerk in the university branch of the post office in Sanctuary is described as "young," with a "dull face," "horn[-rimmed] glasses" and "meticulous" hair (171). He tells Horace that Temple Drake has quit school. (Less than a decade before he wrote Sanctuary Faulkner himself had been the clerk in this post office.)

The "clientele" of the store that Sutpen opens after returning from the Civil War in Absalom, Absalom! includes blacks and whites from the area (147). Shreve McCannon uses the derogatory term "white trash" to describe the white patrons, though his use of the term also indicates that it is one he wasn't familiar with as a Canadian: "what is it? the word? white what? - Yes, trash" (147).

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 "poor whites" who, like "the casual Yankees" and "the southerners who had lived for a while in the north," 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 Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men outside the South who, according to him, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery.

In Light in August these policemen - from Little Rock or Memphis or perhaps some from each - come and get Joe Christmas and Doc Hines from the Little Rock orphanage and escort Joe by train back to the Memphis orphanage.

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses briefly trace the process by which several generations of planters, the white men who own the land, turned the wilderness into fields, using the labor of "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and "hired labor" ever since (270, 323).

According to Ab Snopes in "My Grandmother Millard," "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't copy the strategy that Mrs. Compson used to try to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676).

Along with the "Memphis reporters taking pictures" who swarm around Hightower and his church the day after his wife's death (67), Light in August mentions "some photographers" who set up their cameras in front of the church (68), including one "cameraman" who catches Hightower grimacing behind his hymn book "as though he were smiling" (69). It's not clear if the "reporters taking pictures" and the "photographers" are two different sets of people.

Cinthy, the former slave in Light in August from whom Hightower hears the story of his grandfather's death that he in turn tells his wife, says that it was never known who fired the shot that killed him. Hightower, however, speculates that the shooter "may have been a woman, likely enough the wife of a Confederate soldier" (485). While Hightower says "I like to think so. It's fine so," the uncertainties about his grandfather's death challenge his recurrent heroic image of the man.

This is the "someone in the Square" in "My Grandmother Millard" whom the Yankee officer asks "where General Compson lives" (675).

There's no question that Henry Armstid has driven himself mad "spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy" ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 137) in his "spent and unflagging fury" (The Hamlet, 404) to find buried treasure where there is none. But in both these texts there is something equally disconcerting about the fixed stare on the faces of the country people who gather from many miles around to watch him dig for "a week" (in the short story, 136) or even "two weeks" (in the novel, 404).