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Code title biography
2812 General Joe Wheeler

General Wheeler fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Three decades later he fought for the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Bayard Sartoris in "My Grandmother Millard" says that "Father would have called [him an] apostate" for fighting under the American flag, and the story quotes another Confederate general, Jubal Early, as saying Wheeler will go to hell for that betrayal of the Lost Cause (673).

2811 Francis Marion

Colonel Francis was a real historical figure, one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War. Nicknamed "Swamp Fox," Marion became famous as a guerilla fighter against the British in the early 1780s. Like Faulkner's Colonel Sartoris, he led a small troop of men that effectively harassed a larger occupying army; this is the long campaign that Philip Backhouse refers to in "My Grandmother Millard" when he says his grandfather fought "with Marion all through Carolina" (682). Marion is mentioned again in Requiem for a Nun.

2810 General Jubal Early

A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673).

2809 General Braxton Bragg

Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general who commanded the Army of Tennessee. In "My Grandmother Millard," Colonel Sartoris' troop is, Bayard notes, fighting under his command in that state (674), and Philip Backhouse's uncle is on "Bragg's personal staff" (693).

2808 Philip St-Just Backhouse

"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner.

2807 Backhouse, Uncle of Philip

In "My Grandmother Millard," Philip lists his Uncle, who ran unsuccessfully "for Governor of Tennessee" on what was obviously a pro-slavery platform, as one of the ancestors who have worn the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

2806 Backhouse, Father of Philip

In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

2805 Backhouse, Grandfather of Philip

In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists this Grandfather, who fought on the colonial side with "Marion all through Carolina" during the American Revolution, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

2804 Unnamed Union Officers

According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.)

2803 Unnamed Union Intelligence Officer

In Go Down, Moses Faulkner (or Cass) invents this "Yankee Intelligence officer" who finds Lee's "battle-order . . . on the floor of a saloon" (272). (The losing and finding of Lee's order actually happened during the Civil War, but in fact it was found by a Union corporal lying in the grass.)

2802 Unnamed Union Army Paymaster

In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

2801 Unnamed Traders and Ship-Owners

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about the kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for the Civil War. This entry refers to the group he calls "the narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to the [American] continent only by their-counting houses" (273). He means the business men who made money from the slave and cotton trade with Africa and Europe.

2800 Unnamed Townsmen

Among the people who come out to the hunting camp to watch the final hunt for the bear in Go Down, Moses are several men from beyond Yoknapatawpha, "townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson" (212). They come because they have heard of Lion and Old Ben, but are not hunters: "Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday" (212).

2799 Unnamed Swamper Who Shoots at Old Ben

In Go Down, Moses this "swamper" is described as having "a gaunt face, the small black orifice of his yelling studded with rotten teeth" (226).

2798 Unnamed Spinster Aunts and Uncles

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to him, brought about the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273).

2796 Unnamed Southern Wives and Daughters

In his conversation with his cousin Edmonds in Part 4 of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to the "wives and daughters" of the plantation owners who fed and nursed their sick slaves both in "their stinking cabins" and, "when they were very sick," in "the big house itself" (271).

2795 Unnamed Enslaved People 1

Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.

2794 Unnamed Slaves of McCaslins 2

In Go Down, Moses Carothers McCaslin owned a number of slaves, including the ones he brought with him from Carolina and the ones he fathered; those named slaves have their own entries. This entry represents the rest of the enslaved people on the McCaslin plantation. Old Carothers' sons Buck and Buddy, are reluctant to buy Tennie from Hubert Beauchamp because they "had so many niggers already" (7), but their reluctance extends to other aspects of slave-owning as well.

2793 Unnamed Slaves on Beauchamp Plantation

The Beauchamp property in Go Down, Moses is a large cotton plantation, with an unspecified but clearly large number of slaves who work either in the house or in the fields. "Four or five" of these slaves appear in "Was" when they bring horses for the hunt for Tomey's Turl. During the Civil War most of them leave; according to the narrator, the "ones that didn't go" are the ones that their master, Hubert Beauchamp, "could not have wanted" (287).

2792 Unnamed Biracial Sister of Sickymo

She is the mistress of a federal official in Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction, a connection that leads to her brother’s installation as a marshal in Jefferson. She is described in Go Down, Moses as "half-white" (277).

2791 Unnamed Restaurant Manager 2

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).

2790 Unnamed Real Estate Speculators

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).

2789 Unnamed Politicians and Orators

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.

2788 Unnamed Crop Duster 1

In Go Down, Moses this pilot dusts the crops to kill insects on the fields that make up the Edmonds plantation - except for the plot farmed by Lucas Beauchamp.

2787 Unnamed People in Downtown Memphis 2

The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis in Go Down, Moses are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221).

2786 Unnamed People in Chancellor's Office

"There were a few people going in and out of the office; a few inside, not many" on the day that Roth Edmonds takes Molly Beauchamp to seek a divorce from Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses (122).

2785 Unnamed Parents of Rider

This couple appears in "Pantaloon in Black" as a story and again as a chapter in Go Down, Moses only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt.

2784 Unnamed Spectators at Indian Mound

In Go Down, Moses these "men women and children come at some time during the day and look quietly on" as the archaeologists investigate the Indian mound (37).

2783 Unnamed Northern Laborers

Ike's account of U.S. history in Go Down, Moses divides the North during the Civil War era into the capitalist class and the workers. That second group is who is represented by this entry: "the New England mechanics who didn't even own land," the factory workers who lived in "rented tenements," and so on (273).

2720 Unnamed Northern Businessmen 2

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).

2782 Unnamed Children of Mrs. McCaslin's Sister|Niece

As a widower, in "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin lives in a house in Jefferson with members of his dead wife's family. The short story identifies the woman in that "family" as his wife's niece and says nothing about the rest of them (274). The novel calls her Ike's "sister-in-law" at the beginning of the novel (6) and his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), and identifies the rest of the "family" as her children.

2781 Unnamed Negro Field Workers

In its account of the position Sam Fathers occupies on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation, Go Down, Moses mentions the tenant farmers who "farmed allotted acres" but also acknowledges the existence of the men who do "field-work for daily wages" (161). However, although wage labor was replacing tenantry in parts of the South, no such salaried field-workers appear in the novel.

2780 Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers 4

In it clearly implied in Go Down, Moses that the labor on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is supplied by Negro tenant farmers. They don't appear in the novel, but when Lucas sees the sun coming up he thinks that in "another hour . . . every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it" (40). Like the fields, these mules belong to Roth Edmonds.

2779 Unnamed Negro Carriage Driver 2

In Go Down, Moses the servant who drives Major de Spain's coach is the man who lends Boon the gun he used to shoot at another Negro.

2777 Unnamed Biracial Woman at Beauchamp Place

This young woman who lives in the Beauchamp big house after Emancipation in Go Down, Moses, with skin "even lighter in color than Tomey’s Terrel," is identified by Hubert Beauchamp as his cook (288); however, his sister Sophonsiba is almost certainly right to suspect that she is also his mistress. In response to Sophonsiba's accusation that this woman's presence "defiles" their home, Hubert exclaims "They’re folks too just like we are!" (288).

2776 Unnamed Men Who Live in the Big Bottom

In Go Down, Moses various combinations of the "gaunt, malaria-ridden" men who live in the wildest parts of the big woods (210) appear in throughout the year to look at the dog named Lion while Sam is training him. Many of them feel invested in the hunt for Old Ben, since the bear often raided their crops and attacked their livestock.

2775 Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 3

In Go Down, Moses the named men from town who come into the woods to be part of the hunt for Old Men are Bayard and John Sartoris and Jason Compson, but the group also includes these two unnamed men.

2774 Unnamed Men in Search Party

In addition to Roth Edmonds, Oscar, Dan, Lucas Beauchamp, George and Nat Wilkins, the search party that goes looking for Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses includes at least two additional characters, simply referred to first as "some others" and then as "another man" (120). The race of these people is not indicated, which in Faulkner's fiction usually means someone is white. Elsewhere in the novel, however, it is clear that the only white man who lives on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is Roth, which explains why we identify these 'other men' as 'Negro.'

2773 Unnamed Logging Train Engineer

This "engine-driver" blows the whistle at two different points in Go Down, Moses: after stopping the train on its first run, to scare away the young bear investigating the tracks (303); and to let Ike know they are approaching the area of the hunting camp (306).

2772 Unnamed Loggers

These unarmed loggers who join the hunt for Old Ben in Go Down, Moses travel thirteen miles to get to Major de Spain’s camp.

2771 Unnamed Victims of the Ku Klux Klan

During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' account of it in Go Down, Moses, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277).

2770 Unnamed Veteran Klansman

Only one member of the Ku Klux Klan has any individual existence in "By the People" or The Mansion: a "veteran ranking Klansman" who seems to accept defeat at the hands of the "schoolteachers and editors and Sunday School superintendents" who elected Clarence Snopes as their champion (131, 333).

2769 Unnamed Members of Ku Klux Klan 1

As part of the account in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, these white men "armed in sheets and masks" who terrorize freed blacks are described (277). The details of the description suggests the Ku Klux Klan, especially "formalized regalia of hooded sheets" and "fiery christian symbols" (276), but this group is never given a label. And astonishingly, the narrator suggests that its original founders were the descendants of the carpetbaggers from the North, lynching "the race their ancestors had come to save" (276).

2768 Unnamed Group of Young Negroes

One of Roth Edmonds' grievances against Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses is that, when he would speak to the white man in the presence of "a group of young negroes," he would "lump" black and white "all together as 'you boys'" (112).

2767 Unnamed Grandfather of Will Legate

When Ike tells the younger hunters in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses about the old days "when I first started hunting in this bottom," he mentions that among the men who hunted with him was "Will Legate's" grandfather (328).

2766 Unnamed Frightened Women and Children

As part of his description in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, Ike McCaslin imagines "women crouched with huddled children behind locked doors," seeking shelter from threats that are not named in the text, but are clearly meant to be understood as a consequence of the defeat of the (white) South and the emancipation of the (black) South (277).

2765 Unnamed Friends of Roth Edmonds

Roth Edmonds meets with these unnamed friends after church in "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses; their farm is eight miles from the Edmonds plantation.

2764 Unnamed Federal Army Provost Marshal 1

An A[rmy] P[rovost] M[arshal] is the head of a unit of military police. This "Federal A.P.M." in Go Down, Moses is one of the Yankee troops who are stationed in Mississippi as part of the post-war Reconstruction (277). He has a black mistress, the sister of Sickymo, which is why he ensures that Sickymo is made a marshal in Jefferson.

2763 Unnamed Father-in-Law of Ike McCaslin

In Go Down, Moses this "bank president," who tells Ike about the bank account in Ike's name that Cass Edmonds has been paying money into (295), is certainly not Bayard Sartoris, who is also a Jefferson bank president at the time of the novel. This "bank president" is never named, but although the text is not explicit, it seems likely that he is the father of the woman - also never named - whom Ike marries.

2761 Unnamed Ex-Slaves of Carothers McCaslin

The three paragraph introductory to Go Down, Moses says that "some of the descendants" of the former McCaslin slaves are named McCaslin (5), but curiously no such characters appear in the rest of the story. There the family name of the many people who are descendants of Carothers McCaslin and his slaves is Beauchamp. (There are some of these descendants named McCaslin in The Reivers, published twenty years after Moses.)

2760 Unnamed County Clerk

In both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses the signature of this "nameless clerk" appears on the marriage license for George Wilkins and Nat Beauchamp (221, 70).

2759 Unnamed Negro Cook 8

The black woman who cooks Roth's food does not appear directly in Go Down, Moses, but he does speak to her "through the kitchen door" when he wants her to bring Lucas into the house (125).

2758 Unnamed Chancellor

The Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse in Go Down, Moses hears the divorce petition that Roth Edmonds has put forth for Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is described as “quite old” (123).

2757 Unnamed Boarding House Tenants 2

After Ike renounces his inheritance in Go Down, Moses, he and his wife live for a time in a boarding house in Jefferson whose other tenants are described as "petit juries," countrymen in town to serve as jurors "during court terms," and "itinerant horse- and mule-traders" (285).

2756 Unnamed Enslaved Man at Beauchamps

In the "Was" chapter of Go Down, Moses, this unnamed member of the group of slaves who are part of the hunt for Tomey’s Turl is the one who returns to the big house to fetch a fyce, whiskey, and a "piece of red ribbon that had been on Miss Sophonsiba's neck" that she sends to Buck (17).

2755 Unnamed Bank President 2

In Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin meets with this man in the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time. He is describe as a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like Ike's father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War (267).

2754 Unnamed Authors of the Bible

The first time Ike refers to the Bible in Go Down, Moses, he talks about it as the word of God: "He told in the Book," etc. (243). But when Cass challenges him on the subject of race in the Bible, repeating the familiar pro-slavery argument that the enslaved Africans were the accursed "sons of Ham" (246), Ike introduces the idea of "the men who wrote His Book for Him" (246), i.e. the human authors who "transcribed His Words," and often misquoted Him, or misrepresented His will, despite their desire to "write down the heart's truth" (247).

2753 Unnamed Aunt of Nat Beauchamp

This "aunt" (68) in Vicksburg whom Nat visits in Go Down, Moses is only mentioned once, when Nat tells Roth Edmonds about her trip. Based on the rest of the novel, it's hard to know how this aunt is related to either of Nat's parents, Molly or Lucas.

2752 Unnamed Assistant to Judge Gowan

Judge Gowan's assistant in Go Down, Moses is described as a “young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses” (70).

2751 Unnamed Archaeologists 1

The archaeologists mentioned in Go Down, Moses are "a group of white men, including two women," who descend on the Indian mound to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37).

2750 Unnamed "Hunters"

These "hunters" are created by the narrator at the start of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, when he defines "hunters" as a exalted category of its own, a quasi-spiritual group, men who are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181). Distinguished also from "women," "boys," and "children," hunters tell stories about hunting while drinking liquor "in salute to" their prey (181-82). Even the camp cooks, however, are "hunters first and cooks afterward" (185).

2749 Henry Wyatt

In the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses Wyatt joins Will Legate, Roth Edmonds, and Ike McCaslin and some other men from Yoknapatawpha on the hunting trip to the Delta. There are five other 'Wyatts' in four other Yoknapatawpha fictions, but how or if Henry is related to any of them is never mentioned.

2748 The Jew

Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).

2747 Sickymo

Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.

2746 Mr. Semmes

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.

2745 Doctor Rideout

He is the doctor consulted in Go Down, Moses after Molly Beauchamp is found unconscious along the creek (120).

2744 Sally Rand

Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).

2743 General George Meade

George Meade was given command of the Army of the Potomac just three days before the battle of Gettysburg, site of the charge by Pickett's confederate troops which proved to be a decisive defeat for the Confederate cause. In Go Down, Moses, Cass is referring to that defeat when he notes, somewhat obscurely, that Jeb Stuart and his cavalry troops were not at the battle, "when Lee should have known of all of Meade just where Hancock was on Cemetery Ridge" (272).

2742 Jonas

Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).

2741 Hulett

In Go Down, Moses Hulett works for the Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse, whom Roth Edmonds and Mollie Beauchamp visit regarding a petition for divorce for the Beauchamps. He makes several sharp remarks concerning racial decorum and Lucas’s "uppity" failure to observe it (124).

2740 Hancock, General Winfield Scott

General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom Cass Edmonds mentions in Go Down, Moses as part of his argument with Ike McCaslin about God's role in Southern history (271), was a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and as Cass notes, "on Cemetery Ridge" at Gettysburg (272).

2739 God Whom Ike McCaslin Describes

In the 4th section of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, during his long conversation with his cousin Cass about the history of the world with particular reference to the Old and New South and Ike's own belief that he must relinquish his inheritance from the past, Ike has a lot to say about God - as both the author of the Bible and the providential force behind human events. Ike most frequently refers to this divinity as "He," always capitalizing the H (243, etc).

2738 Phoebe

In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written 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). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849.

2737 Daisy

Daisy is mentioned in Go Down, Moses by Major de Spain when he tells Ike that Ash would be glad to go into the woods, "where he won't have to eat Daisy's cooking" (301). It seems clear that like Ash, Daisy works for the Major as a cook, and it becomes likely that she is Ash's wife when De Spain adds "complain about it" - her cooking - "anyway" (301).

2736 Percival Brownlee

In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278).

2735 Hubert Beauchamp

The full name of Ike McCaslin's "Uncle Hubert" in Go Down, Moses, as readers learn when he signs the i.o.u.'s he leaves his nephew instead of a golden treasure, is Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp. The son of the man who built it, he owns the "Warwick" plantation that is half-a-day’s ride from the McCaslin plantation. After the Civil War he takes a black mistress for a while, and then lives with an aged black servant "in one single room" in the decaying mansion (290) until it burns down.

2734 Beauchamp, Ancestors of Hubert and Sophonsiba

Thinking about his legacy in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to "the ones who sired the Beauchamp who sired Uncle Hubert and his Uncle Hubert's sister" (294). The locution is confusing, in part because "his Uncle Hubert's sister" is in fact Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, as one might expect him to acknowledge. And obviously "the ones who sired" doesn't imply two fathers, but a longer generation of 'sires,' who would include Ike's great-grandfather and earlier male ancestors.

2733 Beauchamp, Father of Hubert and Sophonsiba

Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294).

2732 Aunt Thisbe

When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the only reference to Thisbe in Go Down, Moses, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household.

2731 Turner Ashby

Turner Ashby led a cavalry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. The historical event Cass refers to in Go Down, Moses - how "by chance" Turner Ashby lost and the Union army found "Lee's battle-order" for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion of the North in 1862 - is a famous piece of Civil War history; the order itself, Special Order 191, is often referred to as the 'Lost Dispatch' or the 'Lost Order' (272). Ashby himself was killed in combat in 1862.

2730 Unnamed Sons of Farmers

In "The Bear" the narrative notes that "in April" school is always let out "so that the sons of farmers could help with the land's planting" (291).

2729 John Keats

John Keats, the author of the poem quoted in both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years.

2728 Unnamed Slaves in Delta

Both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses briefly describe the process by which generations of planters created the plantation agriculture of the Delta. Before the Civil War it was these "gangs of slaves" who provided the labor force which turned the wilderness into cotton fields (270, 323).

2727 Unnamed Planters

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).

2726 Unnamed People of This Delta

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin has vividly creates an image the diverse group of human beings that he thinks of as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down (279, 346). It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed" together (279, 346).

2725 Unnamed Youngest Negro in Delta Camp

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339).

2724 Unnamed Biracial Woman 1

The character of the unnamed woman with whom Don Boyd has had an affair and a child in "Delta Autumn" comes into focus slowly. At the start of the story she is referred to elliptically as the "doe" whom Boyd hunted the year before (268). When she appears before Ike in person at the end of the story, she brings with her "something intangible" (277). She is wearing a man's hat and rain coat, and has "a face young" with "dark eyes" (268). She tells Ike she is a teacher.

2723 Unnamed Mississippi Indians 1

In both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the texts briefly mention the Indians who once inhabited Mississippi. As the "successors" of the aboriginal inhabitants, they turned the aboriginals' raised refuges from the water into burial mounds, which suggests their inevitable historical fate: all that is left of these Indians in the present are their words as the names of "the little towns" along the river (271, 325).

2722 Unnamed Hired Delta Farm Workers

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses note that after slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270, 323-24).

2721 Unnamed Sister|Niece of Mrs. McCaslin

In "Delta Autumn," this woman, Ike McCaslin's "dead wife's niece," lives in his house in Jefferson with her children and looks after him during the fifty weeks of the year he is not in the woods (274). In Go Down, Moses this same woman is called his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), but in the first mention of her, in the very beginning of the novel, she is "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" (6). Faulkner either mis-remembered the story when he wrote "sister" or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" later.

2719 Unnamed Negro Father of Young Woman

All we know about the father of the young woman who has given birth to Don Boyd's child in "Delta Autumn" is that he lived in Indianapolis and died "two years ago" (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses he made the young woman's family part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, and so although he made no changes in the way this father is described, radically re-positioned him in the larger Yoknapatawpha narrative; for that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.)

2718 Unnamed Confederate Leaders

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, McCaslin refers to the men who led the Confederacy in the Civil War as the "group of men . . . inside" the U.S. who "tried to tear the country in two with a war" (269, 322). He calls these men "better men" than "Hitler" and "Pelley" (in the story, 269) or "Hitler," "Roosevelt or Wilkie" (in the novel, 322), but seems glad that "they failed" (269, 322).

2717 Unnamed Aboriginals 1

"Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses describe the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians who lived there until the 19th century (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it. (See also the entry for Unnamed First Aboriginal in the index.)

2716 Yokohama

"Yokohama" is the name of a city in Japan rather than a person (269). When in "Delta Autumn" Boyd adds the name to the list of dangers the U.S. faces along with, for example, "Hitler," he seems to be using it as a generic (and somewhat racist) way to refer to 'someone from Japan' (269).

2715 Smith and Jones

"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames. In "Delta Autumn," Don Boyd uses them to suggest how widespread are the contemporary political threats to the U.S. (269). In the revised version of the story that appears in Go Down, Moses, the character who mentions them is Roth Edmonds (322).

2714 William Dudley Pelley

Mentioned by a character in "Delta Autumn" as one of ominous signs on the horizon of contemporary events (269), William Dudley Pelley was a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter and publisher before making a name for himself a fascist and a religious leader. In 1936 Pelley ran for president as the candidate for the Christian Party, preaching antisemitism and socialism as staples for a new Christian Commonwealth. He supported Hitler's ideology regarding Jews.

2713 Unnamed Partner of Ike McCaslin

Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.

2712 Don Boyd

One of the "sons of [Ike McCaslin's] old [hunting] companions" (268), Boyd is a leader of the party of younger hunters in "Delta Autumn"; he has "the youngest face of them all, darkly aquiline, handsome and ruthless and saturnine" (268). The story reveals his ruthlessness in several ways, beginning with his driving and ending with his abandonment of the woman he had an affair with and the child they conceived together. He seems to think money can settle his moral and emotional debts.

2711 Unnamed Ticket Seller 1

In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90).

2710 Unnamed Soldier Who Drives Car

At the request of Mrs. McKellogg, a soldier driving "a big car" takes the Grier boy home from Memphis in "Two Soldiers" (99).

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