The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Cecilia is the only child of the Jefferson jailer and his wife, "a frail anemic girl with narrow workless hands lacking even the strength to milk a cow" (180). She inscribes her name and the date, " Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861 " with a diamond ring on window glass as she watches Confederate troops pass (180).

Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder (50). The younger brother of the Alabama Red, the man Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, he comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple Drake wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132).

Also called "Mulberry" than "Uncle Pete Gombault," this freedman is "a lean clean tobacco-chewing old man" who was enslaved before the Civil War, and became a U.S. "marshal" during Reconstruction (190-91). A salesman of illegal whiskey before, during and after that appointment, as late as 1925 he was still "fire-maker, sweeper, janitor and furnace-attendant to five or six lawyers and doctors and one of the banks" (191-192). He is contemptuous of the various Federal agencies with abbreviated names that came into being in the 1930's, calling them "XYZ and etc. . . ." (190).

Thomas Jackson, who got his famous nickname "Stonewall" during the Battle of Bull Run (or "First Manassas") at which, according to the novel, Sartoris' regiment saw their first combat, was one of the Confederacy's most prominent Generals (36). He is frequently mentioned in the fictions.