In The Hamlet Jack Houston lives with this woman for four years in El Paso, after taking her out of a Galveston brothel seven years before. Although they are never married, she is recognized among the El Paso townsfolk as his wife. He renounces their common law marriage to return to Yoknapatawpha. His wife offers to accompany him to Mississippi and to tolerate the woman he expects to marry, but she curses him repeatedly when he abandons her and leaves her half of his savings.
A "fierce thin wiry man" in The Hamlet (233), Jack Houston's father is a farmer of some wealth with a large section of land that is worked by sharecroppers. He has a somewhat strained relationship with his son, whom he teaches to farm. His eventual death causes Jack to return home after thirteen years away.
According to The Hamlet, Jack Houston's mother spoiled him before her untimely death. She "had taught him to write his name before she died at last and so gave up trying to compel his father to send him to the school" (236).
The "younger of the two negroes" who work in the restaurant that occupies the back half of Rogers' store in Flags in the Dust. He has a "broad untroubled" and "reliable sort of face" (120). In return for serving setups to Young Bayard and Rafe MacCallum, they share some of Henry MacCallum's moonshine whisky with him. (He is not related to the Houston who appears in the Snopes trilogy.)
Houston has no first name when he makes his first appearance, as one of the Bundrens' neighbors who attend Addie's funeral. Nor is his first name given when he - or at least his absence and his corpse - become far more important in "The Hound," where he is shot and killed by another Frenchman's Bend farmer. In the Snopes trilogy he has two different first names. As Jack in The Hamlet his biography is given in some detail, and includes a Negro mistress, a thirteen-year period of wandering around the U.S.
General 'Fighting Joe' Hooker briefly had command of the Union's Army of the Potomac. He is best known for leading a superior Union army to a resounding defeat at Lee's hands at the 1863 battle of Chancellorsville, when (according to Cass Edmonds' account in Go Down, Moses) Stonewall Jackson's men "rolled up the flank which Hooker believed could not be turned" while Hooker himself was "drinking rum toddies and telegraphing Lincoln that he had defeated Lee" (272).
In "Fool about a Horse" Hoke is an offstage character who owns the pasture on the road between Frenchman's Bend and Jefferson where Pat Stamper sets up his camp. (There is also a character named only "Hoke" in Go Down, Moses who owns a sawmill in a different part of the county. Neither of these appears in their texts, and they might be the same Hoke, but it seems more likely that Faulkner is thinking of different characters.)
In Go Down, Moses, Hoke is presumably the owner of the sawmill and commissary where the log-train stops to take Boon and Ike to and from Memphis. (There is also a character named only "Hoke" in "Fool about a Horse" who owns a pasture in a different part of the county. Neither of these appears in their texts, and they might be the same Hoke, but it seems more likely that Faulkner is thinking of different characters.)
