Faulkner recounts or mentions the auction of the wild horses in Frenchman's Bend in four different texts. The auctioneer is a "Texas man," as the narrator of "Spotted Horses" repeatedly calls him (167), a "broad-hatted stranger" in "Centaur in Brass" (150), "that Texas feller" in The Town (35), and Buck Hipps in The Hamlet. His character is displayed in detail in that novel and "Spotted Horses." In both texts he is armed with an "ivory-handled pistol" - though he also carries "a box of gingersnaps" right next to the gun (167, 300).
In The Town, Buck Connors II is the son of Marshal Buck Connors and friends with Chick Mallison. Chick remembers him as one of the group of boys who dared each other during the hunting party that takes place at Harrykin Creek. (The Marshal name is elsewhere spelled 'Conner,' but here both father and son are 'Connors.')
A Jefferson town marshal who appears in several of the fictions, though as "Buck" in Flags in the Dust, as "Buck Conner" in "Centaur in Brass" and Light in August, and as "Buck Conners" in The Town. In the first novel he follows Miss Jenny's orders to get care of Young Bayard, giving up his own bed in the jail building to allow Sartoris to sleep off the effects of his fall and his drinking. Flem Snopes pays him a compliment of sorts in "Centaur": "Buck Conner'll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib" (159).
Briefly mentioned by name in "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, Bridger is one the men in Grumby's gang; he assists Matt Bowden in surrendering Grumby to Bayard and Ringo.
At the end of Intruder in the Dust Gavin mentions "Booker T. Washington" twice while talking to Lucas, contrasting the way Lucas did "what nobody expected you to" with how Washington "did only what everybody expected of him" (237). Gavin's meaning is extremely difficult to pin down. The historical Booker T. Washington was born into slavery but by the end of the 19th century was perhaps the best-known black leader in America. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, a prominent orator and an adviser to several U.S.
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Birdsong is the white night-watchman at the mill whom Rider kills. For fifteen years he has run a crap game using "crooked dice" which allow him to cheat the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay. He is part of a large family clan; as the deputy sheriff says, "It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There’s forty-two active votes in that connection" (252, 148). Birdsong is repeatedly referred to in the narrative as "the white man" who carries a "heavy pistol in his hip pocket" (250-51, 145).
Theron Quick, who appears in The Hamlet as one of the suitors for Eula Varner's hand, could be Lon Quick's son, who appears elsewhere in the novel and has a separate entry in our database. He is among the suitors who ambush McCarron, but ends up being beaten unconscious by Eula, who defends McCarron with her father's buggy whip. He is also one of the two Frenchman's Bend suitors who leave the area "suddenly overnight" once it is discovered that Eula is pregnant - though Ratliff believes both of these young men were "just wishing they had" (140).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Wed, 2019-07-31 15:09
In "Shall Not Perish" the narrator recalls, briefly, how Rosa Millard bravely "stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war" (112). Usually, carpetbaggers are associated with the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, while in The Unvanquished Rosa dies before the end of the war.
In "Shall Not Perish," the wife of Solon Quick lives with him on a farm in Frenchman's Bend. She also rides to Jefferson in the bus that he drives, paying the same fare as all the other riders. The money she uses is "egg-money," that is, money she makes from selling the eggs that her chickens lay (111).
There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon Quick and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. Nor is it absolutely clear how to disambiguate Lon Sr. and his son Lon Jr., or as they are sometimes referred to by other inhabitants of the Bend, "Big Lon" and "Little Lon." This entry is Lon Junior's, who appears in three texts altogether.
