Character Keys

The brief description of Mink's father in The Hamlet could make him seem sympathetic: he's a lifelong sharecropper who "moved from farm to farm, without himself having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them" (261).

In The Mansion Mink Snopes describes "the lady that raised me" as "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).

Minnie Cooper, the central character in "Dry September," is a Jefferson woman, "thirty-eight or thirty-nine" years of age (173); although the story is vague on this point, it is apparently her accusation of assault against Will Mayes the precipitates the lynching. She is described as "still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress" (174). Never married, she lives with her mother and aunt, and has received local derision for her romantic travails and, more recently, her drinking.

In The Mansion Miss Allison is the spinster daughter of Old Major de Spain's sister and "the retired principal of a suburban Los Angeles grammar school" (463). She is deeded the old De Spain mansion - 'the mansion' of the novel's title - by Linda Snopes Kohl.

In The Reivers Ballenbaugh's is currently owned by the "only child" of the second Ballenbaugh, a "fifty-year-old maiden" (74). She is described as a "prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman" who makes her living farming the land, and "running a small store" that has a loft which accommodates overnight guests (74). She may be "fleshless," but the food on "the table Miss Ballenbaugh sets" is well known for the pleasure it provides (74).

In Light in August, Miss Carruthers was the organist in Hightower's church when he preached there, but has now "been dead for almost twenty years" (366).

A major character in The Reivers. "Miss Corrie," as she is called when Lucius first meets her (99) - or "Everbe," as he calls her after learning later in the narrative that her given names are "Everbe Corinthia" (153) - was born in Kiblett, Arkansas. After her mother's death, her foster-mother put her to work as a prostitute "as soon as she was big enough" (154). She is, Lucius notes when he first meets her at Miss Reba's, "a big girl," "still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain" (99).

Despite her title, "Miss Elma" in The Town is the widow of the previous county sheriff who now works as the "office deputy" for Sheriff Hub Hampton (183).

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Holmes is one of two young women on a pleasure outing with Mrs. Bland, Gerald, Spoade and Shreve when Quentin is arrested for kidnapping the unnamed Italian girl. Quentin notes that she and Miss Daingerfield, the other young woman, have "little white noses" (145) and look at him "through veils, with a kind of delicate horror" (141).

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Laura is Quentin's elementary school teacher. She disconcerts Quentin when she asks him "who discovered the Mississippi River" (88), but she may also be the teacher Quentin refers to in Benjy's section, when he tells his father about trying to protect her from a boy who "said he would put a frog in her desk" (68).

Miss Lorraine is one of the two women in Sanctuary who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after Red's funeral. (The context suggests they might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) Lorraine is the "thin woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses" (250). The narrator refers to her "flat spinster's breast" (256) and several times compares her appearance to that of "a school-teacher" (251, 258).

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.

In The Unvanquished - in a passage added to the original story "Raid" - Ringo sleeps in "Missy Lena's cabin" at Hawkhurst; she is undoubtedly a slave on the plantation, but does not appear in the novel herself (99). If her name was given her by the whites who owned her, as was probably the case, Missy Lena is likely a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; in Faulkner's fiction as in southern history, slave names were often a mock-heroic version of classical ones.

"Mister Joe Butler" is one of the two characters whom Byron Snopes invents in Flags in the Dust in his attempt to deceive Virgil Beard about the nature of the anonymous letters he is sending Narcissa (108). He is supposed to live in St. Louis.

In "Hair" Mitch Ewing is one of the narrator's sources of information about Hawkshaw. Because of his job at the railroad station, Ewing knows that Hawkshaw buys a ticket every year to a "junction-point," a station from which "he can go to Memphis or Birmingham or New Orleans" (143). (He may be the same character as the young man named "Mitch" who drinks with Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust.)

In the first five texts that mention this character, she is referred to as either "The Man's|Issetibbeha's sister" or "Ikkemotubbe's|Doom's mother." She is a member of the family of chiefs in the tribe of Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers began arriving, but Faulkner defines the tribe (variously called Choctaw or Chickasaw) as patriarchal, and so as a woman neither she nor her son is in the direct line of succession.

The wife of Lucas Beauchamp figures in five different texts. In the first two ("A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always") she is unnamed. In the first one she speaks a thick, essentially mistrelish dialect ("Yawl and your Gawge Wilkins!" 223), in the second she is only mentioned, once.

This is one of Faulkner's characters who are defined by absence and indeterminacy. In "Ad Astra," when the aviator Monaghan explains his "Shanty Irish" origins, he gives a memorable description of his father, but he cannot trace his ancestry before that: other than saying his father came "out of a peat bog," which suggests the Irish peasantry, Monaghan claims, "I don’t know what my grandfather was. I don’t know if I had one. My father don’t remember one. Likely it could have been one of several" (415).

Montgomery Ward was named for a national retailer (Montgomery Ward) that specialized in selling by mail to rural customers. The son of I.O. and his first wife, he is among the first Snopeses Faulkner ever created. He doesn't appear in Flags in the Dust but is mentioned there when Horace Benbow's neighbor asks him about "your Snopes" (166). After faking a heart condition to evade the draft, Monty had accompanied Horace Benbow to World War I as a non-combatant working with the Y.M.C.A.

Moseley is the Mottson pharmacist who lectures Dewey Dell when she comes to his drug store seeking an abortion. He narrates one chapter in the novel and tells us that he is "a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years" (202).

In the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, the mother of Quentin MacLachan Compson I apparently dies early in his life. He is an "orphan" who is raised by her family in "the Perth highlands" (326).

In The Town Adams is the Jefferson mayor who precedes Manfred de Spain in the office: "the mayor with a long patriarchal white beard, who probably seemed to young people like Cousin Gowan older than God Himself, until he might actually have been the first man" (11).

Mr. Ballott is "the white stable foreman" at the Priest livery stable in The Reivers (7). He runs the business and keeps track of the black employees during the day. The novel's reference to his "first wife" makes it clear that he has been married at least twice (8).

Lucius Binford - or as he's called in two of the three novels in which he is mentioned or appears, Mr. Binford - is the business and romantic partner of Reba Rivers, the madame of a Memphis brothel. In The Mansion he is referred to as a "pimp" (80). In The Reivers, the one novel he actually appears in, Lucius Priest says his "official" title is "landlord" (110). He is a little man, but there is something menancing about him; the first thing you notice about him, Lucius says, is "his eyes . . .

Mr. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed in "Hair." The story's narrator repeats the local rumors that Susan may be Mr. Burchett's illegitmate child, but this is never confirmed.

The boy narrator of "Two Soldiers" calls him "the Law" (89). The employee at the bus depot calls him "Mr. Foote" (89). He's probably the night marshal in Jefferson. He finds the boy alone at dawn in the empty town square, takes him to the depot, and turns him over to the town's informal social service system - "two ladies in fur coats" (90).

In As I Lay Dying Gillespie is a farmer who lives between Mottson and Jefferson. He agrees to let the Bundrens stop for the night on his property, but when his barn burns down as a result he threatens to sue the family unless they have Darl committed to Jackson - the Mississippi state mental institution.

In both "The Tall Men" and The Town, Gombault is a federal marshal in the district that includes Yoknapatawpha. He is only mentioned in the later novel, but in the earlier story he plays a major role. One of Faulkner's most palatable lawmen, Mr. Gombault is repeatedly described as old, yet he moves "quickly, easily" (61). He displays a deep understanding of human behavior as he deals shrewdly with both Mr. Pearson and the McCallum family, and is perhaps one of the "Tall Men" of the story's title as the final line identifies him as a "tall, lean old man" (61).

In "A Rose for Emily," Mr. Grierson has been dead for some time when he is first referred to in the story. Alive he was an old-fashioned, over-bearing patriarch who did not allow his daughter to mingle with any men, keeping all possible suitors at bay. Nonetheless Emily keeps "a crayon portrait" of him displayed in the parlor "on a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace" (120).

Harker is the night engineer of the municipal power plant in Jefferson in both "Centaur in Brass" and The Town. In both the story and the novel he serves as a source of the story of Flem Snopes' effort to embezzle by turning the plant's two Negro firemen against each other. His attitude toward the events is mostly that of a bemused spectator, though in the novel's re-telling of the episode he actively intervenes to help the two Negroes recognize that their real antagonist is the white Snopes.

In The Mansion, Mr. Holland is the President of the Bank of Jefferson, the rival of the bank founded by Bayard Sartoris. Holland creates a scholarship in honor of his "only son," who died fighting in World War II (361).

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 "That Evening Sun," Nancy tells the Compson children that "I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady" - or as Quentin's narrative explains, Mr. Lovelady is "a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents" toward a fund to pay for their funerals (308). He lives at the hotel with his wife and only daughter. Though he and his family occupy only part of a paragraph, the details of their story are provocative: Mrs. Lovelady commits suicide, and after leaving town with his daughter, Mr.

Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).

Mr. Nightingale in The Mansion is "a little scrawny man who wouldn't weigh a hundred pounds" even holding all the tools of his trade (201). His trade is shoe repair, "cobbling" (201). He is also a "Hardshell Baptist" who believes the earth is flat, and an ex-Confederate and unreconstructed Southerner who was "seventeen years old" at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He gets very upset when his son joins the "Yankee" army to fight in World War I (202).

Pearson is the "state draft investigator" in "The Tall Men" (45). A man of "better than average intelligence," he has developed an arrogant, stereotypical way of thinking about country people (48). His previous relief agency work has taught him to expect the worst from such groups, but his encounter with Mr. Gombault and the McCallum family is "different from what he had expected" (48). Over the course of the story, he learns how wrong his assumptions can be.

Mr. Powell is John Powell's father in The Reivers. John works for him "on the farm" to earn the money with which he buys "a .41 caliber snub-nosed revolver" from him (6).

This is the "paw" in The Mansion who "ought" to have "burned" his son's "britches off" for being out in the early morning hours to witness the robbery of the Christian's Drugstore (61).

In Go Down, Moses Semmes is a distiller in Memphis to whom Boon and Ike are sent by Major de Spain for whisky during the annual hunting trip.

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.

He is the husband of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquest, Mrs. Tucker. Rodney makes clear to Georgie, the very young and uncomprehending narrator of "That Will Be Fine," that Mr. Tucker is not involved in his "business" with Mrs. Tucker (266).

The man with the badge outside Grandpa's house in Mottstown in "That Will Be Fine" reminds Georgie of "Mr. Watts at Jefferson that catches the niggers," so it seems safe to say that Watts is either the sheriff or one of the deputies or, perhaps, the town marshal (277). The fact that all the people he catches are black probably reflects the fact that most arrested people in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha are black, not that Watts has a special commission to catch Negroes.

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

Mr. Wordwin, a cashier at the Bank of Jefferson, plays his small part in The Reivers when he accompanies Boon to Memphis to fetch Grandfather's new car, but the narrative adds that he is "a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town" who has been "a groomsman in thirteen weddings" (30).

"The only sister of old Major de Spain," Mrs. Allison in The Mansion is "a bed-ridden old woman living in Los Angeles" (463). She and her daughter end up owning 'the mansion' after which the novel is named. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Allison family that appears in the earlier short story "Beyond," the text doesn't say so.)

The wife of the farmer named Armstid appears or is mentioned in seven texts; she is unnamed in five of them, but her name is Lula in As I Lay Dying, the first one, and Martha in Light in August. That is not the only inconsistency in her character. In both these novels she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind to her husband; in "Spotted Horses," however, she is extremely self-effacing, submitting without complaint to her husband's abusive behavior.

Old Bayard's wife, the grandmother of Young Bayard and Young John Sartoris, is never named, and mentioned only in passing in Flags in the Dust, when that novel sums up the history of the parlor in the Sartoris mansion over the decades. We're told that she and her daughter-in-law and Miss Jenny clean the room "thoroughly" twice a year. There are exactly two words devoted to her: "his wife" (55).

Mrs. Ben Quick makes a very brief appearance in "Tomorrow" when Isham Quick refers to "the dishes and skillet [that] mammy" let Fentry have while he lived in the boiler room at the sawmill (105).

In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Bland is the mother of Quentin's Harvard classmate Gerald; she has moved from Kentucky to Cambridge to be close to her son. She lays claim to an aristocratic heritage, and in person is both formal and insistent. Shreve calls her "fate in eight yards of apricot silk" (106).