Reverend Whitfield is the local preacher in Frenchman's Bend, and in four of the fictions set there. His character varies dramatically across those texts. He appears first in As I Lay Dying, in the part of a minister who has had an unconfessed affair with a married woman and is the father of an illegitimate child; many readers are reminded of Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl, not least because Addie Bundren, Whitfield's lover, names her son Jewel.
Named Redlaw in Flags in the Dust and Redmond in The Unvanquished, this man was Colonel Sartoris' partner in building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha until the two men fell out; after Sartoris defeated him in an election, Redlaw shot and killed him. His name changes to "Ben Redmond" in The Unvanquished, where he also plays a larger role. The second novel adds the detail that he did not fight in the Civil War, one of the things Sartoris taunts him about during the political campaign - though many people in Jefferson know that "he aint no coward" (226).
"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr.
This is one of Faulkner's favorite characters. He appears under two different last names, first as V.K. Suratt (in his first four appearances, in texts published through early 1932), then - apparently after someone named 'Suratt' complained to Faulkner - as V.K. Ratliff in six more texts, beginning in early 1934. Under either name he is an itinerant sewing machine salesman who travels throughout Yoknapatawpha at first on a wagon drawn by a sturdy mismatched team of horses, and then in a small, specially outfitted truck.
In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338).
This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).
Born into an old Virginia family, General George Pickett was 38 years old when, as a division commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, he led the disastrous charge on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg in which thousands of Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. In Absalom! the Canadian Shreve gets the battle wrong, and is quickly corrected by Quentin (289). According to Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, "every Southern boy" can conjure up the moment before the charge began and it still was possible for the South to win the war (190).
The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on.
In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude.
