The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Uncle Willy Christian's soda-jerker (i.e. clerk) and a man with considerable "swagger" (208).

Joanna Burden is one of the major characters in the novel Light in August (1932). Her name appears in this novel when her "mailbox one mile west of the courthouse" is used as a point of reference (206).

When the U.S. enters the First World War, Mack Lendon organizes a company of soldiers "to be known as the Sartoris Rifles in honor of the original Colonel Sartoris" (204). The only two members of the unit who are named are Lendon himself and Tug Nightingale. The company ships out "to Texas for training" (207).

Mack Lendon's mother weighs close to two hundred pounds and "liked to cook and eat both" (205). Hence, she probably does not mind taking Tug in.

This man (who will be elected Captain Lendon's "First Sergeant" in the Sartoris Rifles) tells what happens in 1916 when Lendon and Tug Nightingale try to convince Tug's father to let him join "the Yankee army" (204).

Mack Lendon is "one of a big family of brothers in a big house" (205). A "cotton man, a buyer for one of the Memphis export houses" (207), when the US enters World War I he organizes a group of local volunteers into the Sartoris Rifles, of which he is the original Captain. But according to Charles Mallison, he was "such a bad company commander that he was relieved of his command long before it ever saw the lines" (206).

According to the narrator, the compact organs manufactured by "the Remish Musical Company of South Bend, Indiana," were so popular with the country folk in Frenchman's Bend that in time "boy children from that section were bearing into puberty and even manhood Remish as their Christian names" (87). The narrator of this story is not noticeably facetious, and Faulkner's country people in other stories name their children things like "Montgomery Ward," so there's no reason to think this is just a joke.

General of the Confederate Army who surrendered at Appomattox.

"R[ural] F[ree] D[elivery]" brought mail directly to Americans who lived in the countryside, away from post offices. Because farm families relied on the service to make so many of their purchases by mail, the story's narrator imaginatively calls the "R.F.D. carrier" - each man who delivered the packages - "by proxy tailor and seamstress to rural America" (87).

Notorious itinerant horse-and-mule trader who constantly outwits the men who trade with him. He "recognizes genius" in Tug Nightingale's affinity for horses (202).