Character Keys

Georgie, the seven-year-old narrator of "That Will Be Fine," tells the essentially sordid and ultimately fatal story of his uncle Rodney from a perspective that emphasizes both the ignorance and self-centeredness of childhood. He never questions or recognizes Rodney's various forms of social and criminal misbehavior, and his loyalty to Rodney has its roots less in family love than in greed.

In "That Will Be Fine," the narrator's cousin Louisa is the young daughter of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

In "That Will Be Fine," Aunt Louisa is married to Uncle Fred and mother to Louisa, Fred, and an unnamed baby. As Rodney's older sister, she repeatedly rationalizes her brother's behavior. She hides his misdoings from their father, and pleads for Mr. Pruitt to give him time to get the two thousand dollars he needs to cover his theft from the Compress Association.

In "That Will Be Fine," Emmeline is the nursemaid for Aunt Louisa's baby. She takes Mandy's place in cooking breakfast, complaining "that she was going to waste all her Christmas doing extra work they never had the sense she give them credit for and that this looked like to her it was a good house to be away from nohow" (279).

In "Vendee" Bayard says that the livestock pen at Ab Snopes' cabin was "just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home" (100). The reference to Yance is puzzling, since no character with that name is ever mentioned anywhere else in the fictions, and other Unvanquished stories describe in detail how Bayard, Ringo, Joby and Loosh build that pen at Sartoris. Faulkner might just have forgotten Joby's name: when he reprinted this story as a chapter in The Unvanquished, he changed the name "Yance" to "Joby."

In Requiem for a Nun the carpetbagger named Redmond associates himself with this general, "the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson" (183). (Historically, the Union forces who burned (but did not occupy) Oxford in 1863 were under the command of General Andrew Jackson Smith, who is mentioned as "General Smith" in other Yoknapatawpha fictions.)

The narrator of "Mule in the Yard" singles out from 'the town' as a group this one "town wag" who sends I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule, his wry commentary on all the mules that Snopes loses in "accidents" with freight trains on the "blind curve" on the railroad tracks (252).

In "Mule in the Yard," these "farmers and widows and orphans black and white" (252) buy mules from I.O. Snopes.

Along with the cashier who works for him, this banker in "Mule in the Yard" tries to convince Mannie Hait to invest her settlement money in bonds or a savings or a checking account. (When Faulkner re-tells this event in The Town, the president of the bank is "Major de Spain himself," 244.)

Mannie Hait first appears in "Mule in the Yard," and then returns in her role as widow and adversary of mules and I.O. Snopes when Faulkner re-tells the story in The Town. In both texts she staunchly defends her house against both adversaries, but is defeated by her own carelessness. In the end, however, despite the loss of her house, she manages to get even with one mule and one Snopes.

In "A Bear Hunt" these "town officers" must be local law enforcement officials who, less than a week after Luke Provine appears in town carrying a black sample case, discover that what he is selling is bootleg whisky, a serious crime in Yoknapatawpha, which like the rest of Mississippi prohibited the sale of alcohol - not only during, but also before and after Prohibition (64). (Mississippi did not legalize liquor until the 1960s.) The story suggests they arrest Provine for his crime, but allow Major de Spain to "extricate" him from the charge (64).

These black men in "A Bear Hunt" were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash.

One of the boys in town who, "on a dare," joins the unnamed narrator of "A Bear Hunt" when he was fifteen to spend a night on the Indian mound (66). During and afterwards, they do not speak about their experience, apparently awed by it; the narrator says even though they were children, "yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were - or should have been - beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear" (66).

This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator of "A Bear Hunt" as "scurrying and screaming" when, some twenty years earlier, the Provine gang would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).

The unnamed children of Lucius Provine. The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" makes only one direct reference to them, saying their father "makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64).

Mr. Fraser is the "childless widower" who takes Monk in after his grandmother's death and teaches him how to make whiskey as well as he made it himself (45). They live together for ten years, until Fraser's death. The narrator of "Monk" speculates that "it was probably Fraser who gave [Monk his] name," and the citizens of "the county got to know [Monk] or become familiar with him, at least" through his association with Fraser (45).

In "A Bear Hunt" Bonds is a "dead and forgotten contemporary" of Luke Provine when he was a young man. According to the narrator, it has been "years now" since Bonds, along with Luke and Luke's unnamed brother, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64).

In "Elly" the various men whom the title character kisses in the shadows on her veranda are described as "youths and young men of the town at first, but later . . . almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent" (208).

While talking to Philip in "Elly," Elly invents this "party" of people she will be visiting in order to explain her forthcoming absence - and her need for his silent cooperation. She says that the group she'll be with is comprised of "people you don't know and that I don't expect to see again before I am married" (215).

According to a story that Elly's friend "just heard," Paul de Montigny has an uncle who "killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209). In the friend's mind, this story 'proves' that Paul himself is black, but while believing in 'black blood' as a kind of curse tells us something about the friend and the culture she grew up in, "Elly" does not allow us to say whether Paul even has an uncle, much less whether any of the friend's other assumptions and implications are true.

Elly's unnamed friend entertains Paul de Montigny in her home, but is quick to judge Elly for the latter's interest in him. Elly's friend smokes, furtively, in her home, presumably hoping to escape detection by her parents. But if she too is rebellious, it is within very fixed limits. When Elly defends her behavior with Paul by reminding this girl that "you invited him into your house," she replies "I wasn't hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though" (210). And despite entertaining Paul, she takes the signs of his mixed racial identity as proof of Elly's "queer taste" (209).

Elly's mother lives with her, her husband and especially her mother-in-law in a "biggish house" in Jefferson (208). She is a negligible figure in her daughter's life, though it is her suggestion that Elly drive to Mills City to pick up that mother-in-law that precipitates the story's violent climax.

Elly's grandmother - Elly's father's mother - lives in Elly's family's home in Jefferson, though she is formerly of Louisiana. Her given name is Ailanthia, as is that of the granddaughter after whom "Elly" is titled. Elly's grandmother is frequently described as cold: "cold, piercing" (209), with "that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf," having lost her hearing 15 years before the story takes place (212). The narrator calls her an "old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped" (223).

Although "Elly" begins and ends on the road between Jefferson and Mills City, the only other drivers mentioned in the story are referred to, obliquely, at the very end, after the accident, when Elly thinks, "They won't even stop to see if I am hurt" (224). Their presence is indicated only by the "snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel" that she hears on the road above her (223).

Philip is "a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits" who courts the title character of "Elly" with clock-like regularity (213). As a Jefferson boy whom she has known "from childhood," Philip is the epitome of a suitable husband for Elly (213). His draw as a suitor is indicated in the same breath as his current occupation: "an assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day" (213).

There is a lot that "Elly" never explains about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209).

These are the enslaved people in "Wash" who call Wash "white trash behind his back" (536), and to his face pointedly ask him "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). When they do that, Wash can see their "white eyes and teeth behind which derision lurked" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).

In "Wash," this "half-grown white boy" finds the body of Thomas Sutpen lying outside the tumble-down fishing camp. After "a mesmerized instant" in which he looks at Wash looking at him through a window in the camp, he runs off to report the crime (546). Although Faulkner omits his race (and a hyphen) when he returns to this "halfgrown boy" in Absalom!, he does add a couple of aural details to make the event more dramatic: the boy is "whistling" when he first sees the body, and he "screams" when he sees "Wash in the window, watching him" (229).

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He assumes that the Judge is looking for his own wife, and he sympathizes with him because "It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you" (784).

During his childhood, as Judge Allison describes it in "Beyond," these "two house servants" (790) would supervise his infrequent trips to play outside barefoot in the garden.

These "other children" in "Beyond" are the ones who gave the young mother's son the scars he bears "one day when they were playing" (794). It isn't clear if this happened in a previous life, or in Beyond, but what the mother says - "they didn't know they were going to hurt him" (794) - adds to the details in the story that suggest a connection between this anonymous mother and son and Mary and Jesus in the New Testament.

The people at the Judge's funeral in "Beyond" are not directly mentioned, but their presence can be presumed by the reference to "the line of motor cars at his gate" (797).

While telling Judge Allison whom he might expect to meet in other parts of Beyond, Mothershed mentions "the one that wrote the little women books. If he ain't there, he ought to be" (788). The book titled 'Little Women' was of course not written by a man, and the story doesn't give any further information about either the books or the person Mothershed is thinking of. One possibility is Edward Stratemeyer (1863-1930), who wrote books under pseudonyms for boys as well as girls, but there's no way to say if Faulkner is even thinking about an actual children's book author.

According to the mother that the Judge meets in Beyond, the "old gentleman" who gave the toy soldiers to her son "has a footman to carry his umbrella and overcoat and steamer rug" (793). Typically, a 'footman' is a liveried servant - and not usually found in an American, much less a Southern context. Domestic servants in Yoknapatawpha are black, but given the British locutions here - including "umbrella" and "steamer rug" - there's no reason to assume this footman is.

In "Beyond" Judge Allison mentions the "extra groom" who went with the Allison family when they rode to church in order to tend his son's pony while they were in services (790). "Groom" here means a person employed to take care of horses.

When the Judge enters and again when he leaves Beyond, he encounters a "throng" of people "clotting" through the "narrow entrance" to the place (783, 795). He doesn't like crowds, so the fact that he is in one is "definitely unpleasant," "quite unpleasant" (783, 795). However, in both instances the crowd itself seems quite orderly and calm.

The hands and feet of this child whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" have been scarred by "the other children . . . one day when they were playing" (794). He likes to play with his toy soldiers, one of which is named Pilate, given to him by "an old gentleman who has lived here a long time" (793). A querulous little boy, he seems at the moment mostly "tired of his toys" (793). Like his mother, he evokes the story of Christ, with which the judge has struggled during his adult life.

In "Beyond" these two women live with Howard Allison and his mother during Howard's boyhood; they run the house, rigidly control Howard's life, and patronize his mother.

Historically, Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th-century orator and philosopher nicknamed "The Great Agnostic," whose rejection of Christianity was widely discussed in his day and in Faulkner's. In "Beyond," Faulkner locates Ingersoll in the story's version of heaven, and gives him the role of interlocutor to the protagonist's doubts about God and the afterlife; Ingersoll listens to what Judge Allison says about his life and ideas, but he doesn't offer any solutions or answers.

Judge Allison's father-in-law in "Beyond" was "a Republican" with whose politics the Judge agrees (789). Politically, Allison and his father-in-law are very much in the minority in Yoknapatawpha.

The wife of Judge Allison in "Beyond" is a rather vague character; the only things we know about her are that the Judge was twenty-eight when they married and she bore a son in 1903.

Judge Howard Allison's only son and namesake in "Beyond" is, as the Judge puts it, "the last of my name and race" (789). Young Howard loved riding his pony: "they were inseparable," the Judge says, and he carries a picture of the two of them (790). They boy was killed at the age of ten, found "dragging from the stirrup" of the pony (789). Although he does not appear in the story, one of the inhabitants of Beyond reports seeing him ride by on his pony "every day" (794).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not begin investigating bank robberies until the Depression, a decade after the Sartoris bank was robbed. But Faulkner is almost certainly thinking of the F.B.I. in "There Was a Queen" when he has Narcissa identify the man with whom she has sex as "a Federal agent" who came into possession of the letters she is anxious to get back while pursuing "the man who had robbed the bank" (740).

Although Yankee soldiers do not appear directly in Light in August, according to the account of Van Dorn's cavalry raid that Hightower tells his wife Jefferson was "a garrisoned town," meaning that Union soldiers were stationed there, and to attack it the troop with which his grandfather rode had to travel "for a hundred miles through a country where every grove and hamlet had its Yankee bivouac" (483).

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

In Light in August, this man is mentioned by one of the workers at the planing mill, who says his "pappy" told him how "folks" in Jefferson felt the Burden place "ought to be burned, with a little human fat meat to start it good" (49).

In Light in August this "gaunt, leatherhard woman" recognizes Joe Christmas when he comes to her door for food; when he asks "what day this is," she tells him it is Tuesday, and threatens to call her man if he doesn't go away (332).

The "town" of Jefferson plays a prominent and pervasive role in Light in August, but the only time the narrative refers to the town's children is when it describes the occasional "negro nursemaid" who would pass Hightower's "with her white charges" (59).

One of the hypothetical characters in Light in August, this "undercover man" does not actually appear in Jefferson, but he is fairly vividly conjured up in the imagination of "the town," which is "just waiting" this man to arrest Brown for selling moonshine whiskey (46). At the time the novel takes place, Prohibition made it illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the U.S. But Yoknapatawpha is 'dry' throughout its imaginative history, meaning that it was always illegal to sell alcohol there. The federal agents who enforced this law were colloquially called 'revenuers.'