Character Keys

Mr. Lilley's wife does not appear in Intruder in the Dust, but he cites her - "my wife aint feeling good tonight" - when he explains to Gavin why he isn't going to the Square to join the lynch mob (47).

The "Kemper" mentioned in Intruder in the Dust is General James Kemper (190). His Confederate brigade was part of Pickett's division in the famous charge on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg. He was seriously wounded during the attack, and carried the bullet that struck him for the rest of his life.

In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Gavin Stevens is the elected "County Attorney" who prosecutes even murder cases, but in Intruder in the Dust Gavin says that Lucas' trial will be handled by a "District Attorney": "it's the District Attorney that'll hang you or send you to [prison]," he warns Lucas (58), and this D.A. doesn't live "within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha" (63). He is presumably referring to the man he later identifies by name as Jim Halladay, who works out of a town or city called Harrisburg, which is "sixty miles" from Jefferson (107).

Vinson, the 28-year-old white man whose murder launches Intruder in the Dust, is the youngest of Nub and Amanda Gowrie's six sons. The only one "with an aptitude for trading and for money," he can write checks that the local banks will honor and is "said to own several small parcels" of Yoknapatawpha farmland (162). The business he is engaged in at the time of his death is harvesting timber in partnership with his brother Crawford.

Crawford Gowrie, the intruder behind the title of Intruder in the Dust, never directly appears in the narrative, but the details of his biography are memorable. Second of Hub Gowrie's six sons, he deserted from the U.S. Army on the day before World War I ended, hid for eighteen months "in a series of caves and tunnels in the hills" of Yoknapatawpha, was captured after a gunfight with authorities, served a year in prison, worked out of Memphis either as a rum-runner or a strike-breaker, then returned to Beat Four, reportedly to "more or less settle down" (161).

Vardaman Gowrie and his brother Bilbo are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). Intruder in the Dust treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body.

The "Garnett" referred to by Gavin in Intruder in the Dust in his nostalgic reference to the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg is General Richard Garnett, whose Confederate brigade led Pickett's disastrous charge against the center of the Union lines (190). He was trying to compensate for a stain on his military record when, feverish and injured, he insisted on leading his men from the front, on horseback. He was killed just before reaching the enemy lines.

In Intruder in the Dust Doyle Fraser is "a youngish active man" (20) who works as a clerk in the country store owned by his father, Adam Fraser. Doyle steps in to prevent a white man from attacking Lucas with a plow singletree.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick recalls Ephriam, Paralee's father, "an old man, a widower," living in her cabin and walking the roads at night: "not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day" in a rocking chair (61). By consulting a white fortune-teller, Ephriam finds out where Maggie Mallison's lost ring can be found (69). And like Tomey's Turl in the short story "Was," he knows that it's "womens and children" who are best at getting uncommon things done (70).

The Confederate officer Faulkner calls "Armstead" in Intruder in the Dust (190) is undoubtedly Lewis Armistead, who commanded one of the brigades in Pickett's division that led the famous charge against the Yankee army on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg. Armistead along with some of his unit advanced further in that attack than any other rebels; he was mortally wounded just as he reached the stone wall that marked the Union lines.

In The Town Big Top is Guster's husband and father to Aleck Sander and Little Top. Only his name appears in the narrative (55).

In "A Courtship," this woman is the great-aunt of the second cousin of Herman Basket's aunt (363). As the wife of the "chief Man of the Chickasaws" (365), she would have a lot of status. From her, Herman Basket's aunt acquires both a "silver wine pitcher" (363) and a belief in her own family's superiority.

"Dead" before "A Courtship" begins, this man is mentioned as the original owner of the "shotgun" that Herman Basket's aunt threatens to use on her niece's suitors (368).

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.

The father of the Chickasaw Indian who narrates "A Courtship" advises Ikkemotubbe about the best strategy for courting Herman Basket's sister, and helps Owl-by-Night look for Ikkemotubbe's horse. Along with "the young men," he also stokes the fire in the steamboat at the end of the story (380), which leaves open a possibility that the text never develops: perhaps like Ikkemotubbe, the narrator's father "went away" from the plantation (362).

The "boy slave who turned the wheel" is the steersman on Studenmare's steamboat (366). His age is not given, but the narrator of "A Courtship" notes that he is "not much more than half as big as Captain Studenmare" (366).

Although his name evokes the way enslaved Negroes were often named, Sylvester's John is actually one of the young Chickasaw men who are interested in Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" - until it becomes clear that Ikkemotubbe wants her. After that, he is one of the young men who willingly help Ikkemotubbe's courtship.

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).

The character whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to twice as "old David Colbert" (365, 374) is presumably based on a real historical figure, Levi Colbert. The son of white father from North Carolina and a Chickasaw mother, he grew up among the Indians. Among the real Chickasaws (unlike Faulkner's) kinship was defined in matrilineal terms, and through his mother's lineage and his own accomplishments Colbert eventually became head chief of the Chickasaw nation - or as the story says about "David," "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

In "An Error in Chemistry" these three men from an unidentified place in the North want to buy Wesley Pritchel's farm in order to use the clay from the clay-pit to "manufacture some kind of road material" (119).

In "An Error in Chemistry" the sheriff sends "Ben Berry and some others" to Joel Flint's house in case the escaped Joel Flint returns there (122). These "others" are not described in any way, though it seems as if they are not members of the sheriff's office, which is why we identify them as a kind of 'posse.'

In "An Error in Chemistry" a group of "archaeologists from the State University" dig up Native American relics from Pritchel's clay pit until he runs them off with a shotgun (119).

The unnamed wife of Wesley Pritchel was the mother of four children. She is already dead when "An Error in Chemistry" begins.

Joel Flint, the protean villain in "An Error in Chemistry," used to work in carnivals. At one point he was known as Signor Canova, a master of illusion. After abandoning the Canova persona, Flint started working in other circuses, serving as "bandsman, ringman, Bornean wild man" (134). Eventually, his role in traveling carnivals was as a pitch man with a "roulette wheel wired against imitation watches and pistols which would not shoot" (134).

In "An Error in Chemistry" Bryan Ewell is a deputy sheriff whom the sheriff orders to guard Wesley Pritchel's house after Pritchel has locked himself in his room (122). (Bryan may be related to Walter Ewell, who appears in six other fictions, but there is no mention of any relationship.)

In Go Down, Moses Roscius (spelled "Roskus" by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin inherited" and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). He is the husband of Phoebe (spelled "Fibby" in the ledger, 252), and was like her manumitted when Old Carothers died in 1837. According to the ledger, despite being free he "Dont want to leave," and he remains on the plantation until his death four years later (252).

There are two references in "Appendix Compson" to the slaves who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War. The term "slaves" appears only in reference to the "shiftless slaves" owned by the descendants of the Chickasaw tribe who remain in the region after the Indian Removal (329). But the Compson family, like the other "masters of plantations" in Yoknapatawpha, owned a number of slaves as well (328).

The unnamed secessionists with whom Charles Stuart Compson is associated in "Appendix Compson" endeavored to "secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain" (327). The plotters are headed by General James Wilkinson, whose real-life attempts to sell land to Spain were backed by a number of prominent Kentuckians.

"Napoleon's marshals," otherwise known as the Marshals of the Empire, are characterized in "Appendix Compson" as a "glittering galaxy of knightly blackguards" (325). Napoleon reinstated the rank of marshal, the highest military rank in France, in 1804, and appointed 26 marshals, 18 of them in one month. These men were notable for reflecting his own preferences, rather than for having reached a given level of accomplishment. Nearly all lived luxurious lifestyles, at least in part due to their newly elevated status.

The "dispossessed" king for whom in "Appendix Compson" the grandfather of the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha fought (325) is Charles Edward Stuart, who spent most of his life in exile but claimed to be the rightful king of Britain as part of the Jacobite line of Catholic monarchs. His hope of claiming the throne ended in 1746, when the Jacobites were defeated in a final battle in Scotland. Charles himself is perhaps best remembered for a romantic escape through the Scottish countryside after that loss.

The officers of the law in Jason Compson IV's entry in "Appendix Compson" are described from the anxious perspective of his own criminality: when his niece takes the money he's been embezzling, he cannot turn to them for help recovering it without admitting more of his affairs than he cares to, and yet he chafes at paying for a police force that he characterizes as existing in "parasitic and sadistic idleness" (342).

The Chickasaw were one of several tribes that were displaced by President Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830. In "Appendix Compson," Faulkner indicates the enduring consequences of that removal, referring to the Chickasaw people in Oklahoma as "the homeless descendants of the dispossessed" (326).

In "Appendix Compson" these "highschool juniors and seniors" are described from the perspective of Melissa Meek, who emphasizes both their great height relative to her own petite stature and also their seemingly relentless desire to thwart her moderate attempts at book censure (333).

These "overalled men" in "Appendix Compson" are customers at the farmers' supply store where Jason IV owns a business buying and selling cotton (334). Although the customers are explicitly male, since the store is a "gloomy cavern which only men ever entered" (333), their race is not so clearly defined; the narrative indicates that the store serves "Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers" (334), indicating that many, if not most of the customers are African-American.

In "Appendix Compson," this district Chancellor annually reviews the financial reports submitted by Jason Compson as the "guardian and trustee" of his niece (342).

The descendants of Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws who remain after the Removal eventually disappear too, but that does not mean that there are no living men or women with Chickasaw blood. The narrative indicates that those who still carry Chickasaw blood are "living not as warriors and hunters but as white men - as shiftless farmers or, here and there, the masters of what they too called plantations" (328).

In "Appendix Compson" the owner of the boardinghouse that used to be the Compson family home is a "countryman," which in this context refers to a rural person as opposed to someone from town (331).

Napoleon Bonaparte rose to prominence in France during the French Revolution. In 1804 he proclaimed himself Emperor, and undertook to wage a series of wars in order to achieve dominion over Europe. The allusion to him at the beginning of "Appendix Compson" serves as a template for several of the characters Faulkner will create: dictatorial leaders driven to expand their holdings at all costs.

The British commander that Charles Stuart Compson fought under in the "Appendix Compson" (326), Banastre Tarleton, was known in England as an outstanding military leader during the Revolutionary War, which he joined at the age of 21. In America, however, Tarleton had a reputation for savagery on the field; he and his men participated in the capture of Charleston, and later became infamous for what Americans called the "Waxhaws Massacre" in South Carolina in 1780.

The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians.

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111), the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses, as a reference point for the age of his father's Grandfather.

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish."

Thinking about the local men killed in the war leads the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" to imagine "all the grieving about the earth, the rich and the poor too" (103): the people who lose loved ones in the fighting.

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" and his mother tour an art museum in Jefferson that contains "pictures from all over the United States, painted by people who loved what they had seen or where they had been born or lived enough to want to paint pictures of it so that other people could see it too" (110). These works of art, and the people who created them, fuel the Grier boy's imagination.

In "Shall Not Perish," after Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures.

As the progress of the Civil War brings the Union Army closer to Yoknapatawpha in "My Grandmother Millard," Lucius begins meeting with "Negroes from other plantations," presumably to talk about the possibility of emancipating themselves (669).

The "Richmond Editor" mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard" is less a character than a way of locating an event: it is in his newspaper office that Jubal Early calls "Joe Wheeler" an "apostate and matricide" for fighting in the American Army during the Spanish-American War (673).

The "provost" who arrests Philip for disobeying orders in "My Grandmother Millard" (692). In the Confederate armies, provost marshals were charged with maintaining discipline - like military police in the modern U.S. armed forces. (The second time the story refers to him, "Provost" is capitalized, 694.)

These five Confederate cavalry officers accompany General Forrest when he visits the Sartoris plantation in "My Grandmother Millard." Bayard says they are "all officers," adding that "I never saw this much braid before" (691). Granny refers to them as "gentlemen," and the story confirms that when it describes how carefully they avoid "trombling even one flower bed" on the plantation lawn (691).