In "A Rose for Emily," Homer Barron is the "big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face" who comes to Jefferson to to oversee the workers paving the town's sidewalks (124). When he and Emily Grierson begin appearing in public together in "the yellow-wheeled buggy . . . from the livery stable," the town is soon scandalized that "a Grierson" woman might think "seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer" (124). Homer tells the "younger men in the Elks' Club . . .
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).
Miss Emily, as the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" explains, is “a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (119). In other words, she is a recluse and a source of fascination for the townspeople of Jefferson, who keep a constant eye on her doings. She never married, and her domineering father kept potential suitors away from her, but after his death she had a potentially scandalous relationship with a single suitor, a Yankee stranger named Homer Barron.
In The Town, as the florist in Jefferson, "Mrs Rouncewell" gives her name to a memorable event in Jefferson history, the "Mrs Rouncewell panic" (81). This ensues when her shop runs out of flowers before a major dance. "She ran the flower shop; not . . . because she loved flowers nor even because she loved money but because she loved funerals; she had buried two husbands herself and took the second one's insurance and opened the flower shop and furnished the flowers for every funeral in Jefferson since" (73). In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Mansion, Mrs.
According to Mink, Solon Quick may have been the local man who saw a bear "three years ago" (34). Solon may also be the same character as Lon Quick, who appears in this novel as the local constable and has his own character entry - some scholars assume that "Lon" and "Solon" are two versions of the same name. But we have chosen to treat them in this text, and in the other texts when one or the other appears, as different characters.
In Flags in the Dust Little Belle is the young daughter of Belle and Harry Mitchell who, by the end, is Horace Benbow's step-daughter - though Belle herself makes it clear to her new acquaintances in the new town she lives in "that Horace is not her real daddy" (378). When she appears again in Sanctuary she is a young woman.
Hoake McCarron's father makes a dashing figure in The Hamlet: a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman.
In The Hamlet the mother of Hoake McCarron, Alison McCarron, comes from wealth as her deceased mother was the daughter of a "well-to-do" landowner (149). At nineteen, she eloped with Mr. McCarron a gambler with no definite past, climbing out of a second-story window to avoid her father. Her story is omitted in The Mansion, where she is merely described as a "well-to-do" widow (139).
As "Tom-Tom" in "Centaur in Brass" and as "Tom Tom" in The Town, he works as the day fireman for Jefferson's power plant. (In this context a 'fireman' is someone who keeps a fire in a boiler burning, not one who puts fires out.) In both texts he is a "big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds, "sixty years old," and married to a young wife he maintains "with the strict jealous seclusion of a Turk in a cabin about two miles down the railroad track from the plant" (16, 152).
In The Sound and the Fury Lorraine is the woman Jason is seeing in Memphis, Tennessee. In the letter she sends him, she calls Jason "my sweet daddy" (193). Their relationship seems based on the money he gives her and the sex she gives him. Jason thinks of her as "a good honest whore" (233). His ideas about other people, especially women, are hardly reliable, but in this case it does seem likely that Lorraine is one of the many Memphis prostitutes in Faulkner's fiction.
