The "Negro women" in the story appear only in a negative phrase identifying Colonel Sartoris as the Jefferson mayor who "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (119-20). We hear nothing else about these women or this edict, whether they complied or it was enforced or when it might have been rescinded. The "apron" would have typified, not to say stereo-typified, all black women as domestic servants.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 16:12
In this novel the Memphis gangster who commits murders and abducts Temple is appears only in the descriptions of him by Temple herself and Gavin. In Sanctuary, where Popeye first appears, the third-person narrator never gives him a last name, but according to Gavin his "Italian name" is Vitelli (114). Temple refers to him as an "underworld big shot" (112). Gavin's descriptions are more lurid: he calls Popeye "a psychopath . . . a little black thing with an Italian name like a neat and only slightly deformed cockroach: a hybrid, sexually incapable" (110).
In Requiem for a Nun an unspecified group of Indians, identified only as "old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren," charge candy to Ratcliffe's trading post (28-29).
This is one of the several Faulkner characters whose inconsistencies cannot be reconciled. In the short story "A Name for the City," it is this unnamed granddaughter of Issetibbeha who marries a white man, Doctor Habersham's son; together the couple "emigrated to Oklahoma" in "the thirties" (i.e. the 1830s) along with the rest of the Chickasaws (202).
The unnamed son of Moketubbe is identified as an "eight-year-old" in "The Old People" and in Go Down, Moses (202, 158) and as "Moketubbe's little son" in "A Courtship" (363). He should have grown up to succeed his father as the chief of the tribe. However, in all three texts he dies within the same sentence in which he is first mentioned and within a few days after Ikkemotubbe, his father's cousin, returns to the tribe from New Orleans with a white powder that kills at least a puppy - and probably, though none of the texts say so explicitly, this child.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:56
Maggie, Gavin Stevens' twin sister, never appears on stage but is identified as the receiver of telephone messages from Temple Drake Stevens and Gowan Stevens.
The woman who is the mother of Sam Fathers appears in four texts, though never as exactly the same person; her character changes as Faulkner's idea of the character Sam Fathers changes. In "A Justice," Sam is the son a slave whom Doom wins on a steamboat; she is married to another slave, but forced into a sexual relationship with one of the Indians, Crawford, who is the biological father of Sam.
Sometimes-Wakeup is one of Doom's two uncles in "A Justice," the brother of the Man prior to Doom, and he lives "by himself in a cabin by the creek" (349). He is apparently a recluse, whom the People only see when they take him food. After Doom murders the Man and the Man's son, Sometimes-Wakeup is next in the order of succession, though he declines to accept the position.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:45
Although Gowan Stevens certainly had a grandfather, the only reference to this individual occurs in Temple's 'double-talk' when her husband, Gowan, asks her what she has been talking about with Gavin: "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather and that I'm going up to give Bucky his bath and supper" (51-52). Actually, she has made no reference to any of these things, and is simply hoping to deceive Gowan.
In "Red Leaves," "Moketubbe's mother" is introduced as a "comely girl" (320) whom Issetibbeha marries after seeing her at work in a melon patch. She is described as having "broad, solid thighs," a "sound back" and a "serene face" (321). Her race is not specified. Our identification of her as "Black" and "Enslaved" (rather than "Indian" and "Tribal Member") is based on her clothing (a "shift") and the fact that she is engaged in field labor, along with the way seeing her reminds Issetibbeha of his "own mother," with "her Negro blood" (321). But this is an interpretive choice.
