Character Keys

The warden at Parchman when Mink first arrives there in The Mansion is remarkably kind to his prisoner, helping Mink with his correspondence to his wife.

These "dozen trusties" in the Parchman penitentiary are not described in any detail in The Mansion (74), but "trusty" is the generic term for prison inmates who can be trusted to help the authorities administer the institution. They are typically given (minor) privileges and allowed (limited) freedoms that other inmates aren't. Montgomery Ward Snopes assumes Flem could bribe one of them to kill Mink for "ten grand" - ten thousand dollars (74).

"Monk" includes two separate visits to the state penitentiary, but the only specific reference it makes to the inmate population is when, during an "abortive jailbreak," Monk shoots the warden. "Fifty men" see him do that, and "some of the other convicts" overpower him afterwards (50). One of these men is later identified as Bill Terrel, and some of them, like Bill Terrel, are considered by the Governor's Pardon Board for release.

In The Mansion Mink turns to "the prison doctor" for an explanation of how deafness works (454).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin and Deacon discuss the time the black man marched in the parade "on Decoration Day" (82). Decoration Day was the southern name for Memorial Day, originally created to honor the veterans of the Civil War and in 1910 it would have been celebrated on the last Monday of May. Deacon mentions both "the old vet'runs" and the "ladies" who organize the celebration (98). Deacon was was wearing a "G.A.R. uniform," i.e. the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union army (82).

The man who makes "Miss Zilphia Gant" a Missus is introduced as "a tramp painter," an itinerant whom her mother hires to repaint the dressmaking shop. His last name is never given, so we cannot know Zilphia's married name. Her husband is described as "a young man with black hair and eyes like wood ashes" (375). Despite his own prejudice against any "woman that wore glasses" (377), he falls in love with Zilphia, and vows to her to "get you out of" the miserable life her mother forces her to live (376).

While at the University in Oxford in The Hamlet, Labove lives in a "boarding house" owned by this landlady (129).

He owns the circus at which Milly Hines meets the father of her baby in Light in August. He appears in the novel during Milly's father's murder trial, to testify that the man Hines murders "was a part nigger instead of Mexican" (377).

In Intruder in the Dust the "overseer" at the Mallison farm helps Mrs. Mallison look for her missing ring (70).

In Intruder in the Dust both Chick Mallison and Gavin Stevens at different points imagine a group they identify as "outlanders" (149, 199). In the second instance Gavin describes them to Chick as the people of "the North and East and West" who are currently seeking to "force on us [the South] laws based on the idea that man's injustice to man can be abolished overnight" (199).

In Light in August these children in the Memphis orphanage wear "identical and uniform blue denim" (119). Joe seems to live apart from most of them, except a few of the older girls who show him some maternal kindess. According to Hines and the dietitian, at least some of these children call Joe "Nigger" (127).

The Mansion refers to "Yoknapatawpha County's three original settlers" (421) but only gives one of them a name: Alexander Holston (he has his own Character entry). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions this group always includes Samuel Habersham, sometimes along with his (unnamed) son; in "Hand Upon the Waters," the group includes an ancestor of Gavin Stevens as one of the three.

According to Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, "all the men" who first came to Jefferson worked together to build it, "to shape a land for their posterity" (49); according to this account, "the jailer then" or the "innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler" could be "what the lawyer and planter and doctor and parson called a gentleman" (49). This definition of "all the men" leaves out the ones who were enslaved.

Musicians play at the Grotto club at two different points in Sanctuary. The first time, this regular club "orchestra" provides the soundtrack to the scene in which Popeye and Red compete fatally for Temple. The dance music they play "swirls slowly about her in a bright myriad wave" (238). But the narrative never describes either the musicians or the music more particularly; given the history of music in Memphis, they may be black.

This senior officer in the R.A.F. squadron in "All the Dead Pilots" seems like a by-the-book kind of soldier; he won't release Sartoris from duty just because Sartoris asks. He does have a sense of humor, though, and at least a working knowledge of history and geography: "the operations officer told him that La Fayette awaited him on the Santerre plateau" (522) - in other words, "get back to work."

This man, the senior of the two representatives from the company that bonds De Spain in The Town, has "gray hair" and comes to town wearing "striped britches and a gold watch chain big enough to boom logs with and gold eyeglasses and even a gold toothpick and the pigeon-tailed coat and the plug hat" (88).

According to Varner in The Hamlet, this "old woman" told his "mammy" that if "a woman showed her belly to the full moon," she would have "a gal" (339).

This woman runs and probably owns the "estaminet, a 'bit of a pub,'" in a back street of Amiens where 'Toinette works in "All the Dead Pilots" (516). She and the girl are not related to one another, which raises the question of the exact nature of their business arrangement; she apparently knows of 'Toinette's affairs with Sartoris and Spoomer but does not object to them.

While some "old people" are included in the group in The Mansion that goes to the movie in Jefferson ("couples, young men and girls and old people," 36), this entry represents the "old people" that the narrative specifically identifies, who "didn't go to the picture show" but instead sit in their rocking chairs (38).

In Absalom!, as Sutpen moves across the Square after talking with General Compson, the General sees "old Mr McCaslin and two other old men hobble out and stop him" to talk (221). McCaslin has his own entry. The fact that all three are "old" is an indication of how the Civil War has emptied Jefferson of most of its other male residents.

Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "an old man in a shabby brown overcoat" sailing a toy boat beside the children (316).

Mentioned only in passing in Flags in the Dust, she is the charitable "old lady of the town" in whose automobile the wife and children of the "family of country people" (also unnamed) take their husband and father to the train station, where he leaves for the War (72).

Shortly after Issetibbeha dies in "Red Leaves," this unnamed man speaks with two Indian women about the old days, before "the world" was "ruined by white men" and slavery (323).

Only referred to generically in The Town as "the oil company," these faceless men "cuss Mr [Eck] Snopes" for his foolishness in blowing himself and one of their tanks up, but also give his widow $1000, "even if she had married a fool" (117).

The "official" on the train in Sanctuary who "shakes his fist" at Temple for jumping off at Taylor may be the conductor, or perhaps a chaperone from the college (36).

These "officers" in Sanctuary who search the "ramshackle house" of the "old half-crazed white woman" who manufactures "spells for negroes" may be local policemen, or, since they are looking for whiskey, federal revenue agents (201). In any case, there is nothing alcoholic in the "collection of dirty bottles containing liquid" which they find (201). There must be at least three of them, because two of them "hold" the woman during the search (201).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (70, 71; 206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (70, 206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers carpetbaggers, the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War.

This prostitute in Light in August has just had sex with a black patron before Joe's "turn," so she responds with indifference when Christmas tries to provoke her by saying "that he is a negro" (225). In response, he beats her so badly that "at first they thought that the woman was dead" (225).

In Absalom! these are the "Northern people" who, at least in Miss Rosa's mind, have destroyed "the South" (5).

Ike McCaslin's account of the Civil War in Go Down, Moses juxtaposes the leaders of the Confederate cause with the various Yankees who opposed them. This entry represents his roster of the economic elite in northern and western states that didn't secede: "the wildcat manipulators" and land speculators, "the bankers," the landlords and factory owners (273).

According to Gavin in The Mansion, "the rest of the world, at least that part of it in the United States, rates us folks in Mississippi at the lowest rung of culture" (167). This entry represents those people outside Mississippi - especially in the North.

The job of Jefferson's night marshal includes enforcing an informal curfew by trying to get people off the streets during the night, although according to The Mansion his threats to the men who remain in the barbershop or poolroom at "two oclock on Sunday mornings" sound too vague to be effective. "If you boys don't quiet down and go home" - apparently he never finishes that sentence (203).

In Light in August "the night marshal" joins Percy Grimm's squad of peacekeepers (456). When he does not join their poker game, some of the veterans jokingly call him an "M.P." and give him the Bronx cheer they learned to make during the war (457).

These "young fellers from the paper" who report the story of Mink Snopes' attempted prison break in The Mansion repeatedly ask him what his real name is, since "Mink" is "jest a nickname" (98).

The "editor" of the local newspaper in "Death Drag" also does print jobs, like the handbill advertising the air show that Ginsfarb asks him to print (190). He expresses skepticism about the details of the performance, and when he demands payment in advance - "I ain't in this business for fun," he tells Ginsfarb - the job gets cancelled (191).

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" imagines these boys selling newspapers announcing the England's entry into World War I as Spoomer's uncle predicts war "will be the making of the army" (513).

These advertisers - presumably local businessmen and professionals - appear only hypothetically in "Go Down, Moses," when Mr. Wilmoth, the editor of the Jefferson paper, worries whether he'll lose "what few advertisers I have got" (262) for helping Stevens organize a funeral for a black man, Samuel Beauchamp.

The Indians in "Red Leaves" - or at least the tribal chief, the Man - practice polygamy, as is clear from the reference to "Issetibbeha dying among his wives" (329). This is Issetibbeha's "newest wife" (321), not Moketubbe's mother but the woman who tells him Moketubbe has hidden the red slippers that he has always coveted. She is unwilling to sleep in the gilt bed that Issetibbeha brought back from Paris, but no other details about her are provided.

As The Mansion notes, the registrar in New York's city hall records marriages in the city - like the one between Linda Snopes and Barton Kohl.

In The Mansion this unnamed "newspaper man" and his partner - "a young couple about the same age as them" (191) - are going to occupy Barton and Linda's apartment once they leave for Spain.

After rebuilding his house in "Knight's Gambit," Mr. Harriss "begins to bring friends up from New Orleans" (162); "strange outlanders" (163); "men and the women with a hard, sleek, expensive unmarried air and look about them even when now and then some of them really were married to each other perhaps" (163).

This "New Englander" is different from the 'Yankees' and 'Northerners' that Gavin Stevens often disparages in Intruder in the Dust. During his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7, Gavin mentions "the New Englander" after telling his nephew that the white South, "alone in the United States," is "a homogeneous people"; he adds that this "New Englander" who lives "back inland" from the cities on the coast is also homogeneous, "but there are no longer enough of him" to preserve what, in Gavin's mind, the white South must defend (150).

"An Error in Chemistry" refers to the neighbors of Wesley Pritchel as the "people in the adjacent countryside" (119). It is safe to assume that they are all, like Pritchel himself, farming families. They play several different roles in the story. They gossip about Wesley's relationship with his "son-in-law" (114). Until Pritchel drives them off, they take clay from his clay-pit to make "serviceable though crude pottery" (119). The "man and his wife" who are Pritchel's "nearest neighbors" are summoned to his house by the sheriff to stay with the old man after Ellie's murder (118).

In "Dry September" over time Minnie Cooper's only social contacts become the women who live in her neighborhood - identified as both "neighbors" and "friends" in the text (175, 180). She occasionally goes to movie with them. While the lynching is going on outside town, a group of them take her to another movie, walking through the streets with her, reassuring her with "voices" that sound "like long, hovering sighs of hissing exultation" that "'there's not a Negro on the Square'" (181).

Houston's neighbors in The Mansion "didn't dare knock on his door anymore" after his wife died (8).

When Vernon Tull arrives at the Bundren house the day after Addie’s death in As I Lay Dying, he finds "about a dozen wagons was already there" (85). These belong to the group of neighbors who attend Addie’s funeral. Before the service they divide themselves into female and male groups: the "womenfolks" wait inside the house while "the men stop on the porch, talking some, not looking at one another" or "sit and squat" a "little piece from the house" (87). When "the women begin to sing," the men move into the house (91).

This is the man who lives "four miles away" from Sutpen's in Absalom! and who captures Bon's horse two days after Bon's funeral (123).

This man is a "neighbor" of Mrs. Harriss in "Knight's Gambit"; because he passes her property "on his way home," he can provide the people in Jefferson with information about Gualdres' odd behavior at nights (178).

In Light in August this "neighbor" pays Christmas two dollars for chopping wood (197).