Character Keys

During Horace's first conversation with Lee Goodwin in his jail cell, the child that Ruby is holding is compared by the narrator of Sanctuary to "the children which beggars on Paris streets carry" (116). Horace has been to France, and is carrying a French novel when the novel begins. The novel's final scene is set in Paris. Still, in the immediate context of the narrow cell that confines Goodwin, the narrative's sudden evocation of life half a world away from Yoknapatawpha comes as a surprise.

These "two shabby negro men" in Sanctuary whom Clarence, Virgil and Fonzo see arguing with a white man in the hallway of the Negro brothel in Memphis; they may work there (as bouncers, perhaps), or may be customers themselves (198).

In Sanctuary, when Temple and her father sit down "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris, this "old woman" comes to them "with decrepit promptitude" to collect the money - four sous - for the seats (316).

This is the neighbor of Popeye's mother in Sanctuary who reports him for "cutting up a half-grown kitten" (309). It may be the neighbor who reported the fire in the boarding house earlier, but the text gives no indication of that.

Outside the county jail in Sanctuary these Negroes gather in the evenings and sing with the man inside awaiting execution. They wear "natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls" (114), and have "work-thickened shoulders" (124).

The prostitutes who work at the less expensive Memphis brothel to which Clarence takes Virgil and Fonzo in Sanctuary are described as "coffee-colored" (199). Their dresses are "bright," their hair is "ornate" and their smiles are "golden" (199).

Sanctuary does not name this man, except as the "murderer" (114) who is awaiting his execution in the jail when Goodwin is locked up there. He killed his wife with a razor. According to another unnamed black character, he is the "bes ba'ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!" His constant singing of "spirituals" and blues songs in jail, accompanied by a "chorus" of other blacks outside the window, provides a kind of soundtrack for the novel's main narrative (114-15).

The "negro porter of the hotel" where Ruby stays in Sanctuary (135) briefly appears in three separate scenes: showing Ruby to her room in Chapter 16, fetching Horace to the hotel in Chapter 17, and showing Horace where he can wait for a train in Chapter 29. Faulkner may have been thinking of one man in all three cases, or two, or three.

When Temple thinks about her father "sitting on the porch at home" in Sanctuary, she imagines that he is "watching a negro mow the lawn" (51).

On the train to Oxford in Sanctuary are "three middle-aged women" who cannot find seats, because of the "gay rudeness" of the college students who pushed into the car ahead of them (169).

When Horace goes downtown on his second day in Jefferson in Sanctuary, he renews his acquaintance with the men he meets around the courthouse: "merchants and professional men," most of whom "remembered him as a boy" (112). They are not otherwise characterized.

In Sanctuary the men lounging at the Taylor station who watch Temple as she gets off the train are "chewing slowly" (presumably tobacco) and wearing overalls (36).

In Sanctuary this porter at the door of the Hotel Gayoso offers to carry Virgil and Fonzo's suitcases, but they "brush past him" (190).

Sanctuary simply refers to the people eating dinner when Ruby comes in to use the phone as "Tull's family" (105). The story "Spotted Horses" (which was published a few months after Sanctuary) is a bit more forthcoming, listing "his wife and three daughters and Mrs. Tull's aunt." On that basis we identify the gender of the family as "female."

In Sanctuary Horace sees but cannot overhear this "gesticulant" man in "his shirt sleeves" haranguing the crowd that gathers in front of the jail after Lee Goodwin is convicted (293). While it seems certain that he is inciting them to violence against Lee, the crowd remains "quite orderly" after he finishes "talking himself out" (293).

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this man get out of a taxi with a "plump blonde woman" (192). The couple's behavior outside the door causes Fonzo to suck in his breath, and Virgil to assume that they must be married, but while the narrator never says so explicitly, it's clear enough that she is a prostitute and he is one of her customers. He leaves in the taxi after dropping her off at the house.

In Sanctuary within a few hours after Lee is convicted - formally for Tommy's murder, and in the minds of the townspeople for Temple's rape - the crowd that gathers in the Square turns into a lynch mob of "antic" figures who burn him to death (296). We see the confused scene through Horace's eyes. He registers running men, "panting shouts," a "circle" that has gathered around a "blazing mass" (295-96), but only one member of the mob is individualized: a man "carrying a five-gallon coal oil can" which explodes in his hands.

Because they felt sorry about his handicap, the unnamed law professors who taught Eustace Graham at the "State University" in Sanctuary "groomed him like a race-horse" (262).

In an odd aside, Sanctuary notes that the "suit of gray" worn by the "old man" in Kinston who drives the taxi was "made by Jews in the New York tenement district" (298). Many different ethnicities worked in the city's garment industry and belonged to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (founded in 1900), but the stereotype of the Jewish garment worker was widespread in the 1920s.

When she imagines herself dead as a way to escape Popeye's sexual assault in Sanctuary, Temple's fantasy includes "all the people sitting around the coffin, saying Dont she look sweet" (219).

The second husband of Popeye's maternal grandmother appears in and disappears from Sanctuary in half a paragraph. We see "an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache" who is very handy maintaining the boarding house his wife owns, until the day he walks out with a check to pay the butcher and instead vanishes with all the money she has saved (304).

This "old half-crazed white woman" in Sanctuary is one of Jefferson's most eccentric inhabitants (200). The physical description of her is equally striking: her "lank grayish hair" hangs beside "the glittering collapse of her face" (201). She is reported to make her living by "manufactur[ing] spells for negroes" (200), though her house was also once raided by "officers searching for whiskey" (201). Horace arranges for Ruby to stay in the "lean-to shed room" attached to her house. (This woman may recur as "Mrs.

Waiters appear in both scenes set in the Grotto club in Sanctuary. In Chapter 25, describing the funeral for Red, they are clearly identified as "negro waiters, in black shirts beneath starched jackets." In the previous chapter, however, the narrative describes the two waiters who place drinks in front of Temple and Popeye in more racially ambiguous terms: seen from Temple's perspective they appear as "a brown [hand] in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff" (235). Also in Chapter 24, "a waiter" shows Temple to a private room, where Red joins her (238).

Musicians play at the Grotto club at two different points in Sanctuary. The first time, this regular club "orchestra" provides the soundtrack to the scene in which Popeye and Red compete fatally for Temple. The dance music they play "swirls slowly about her in a bright myriad wave" (238). But the narrative never describes either the musicians or the music more particularly; given the history of music in Memphis, they may be black.

In Sanctuary the mother of Popeye's mother seems normal enough when first introduced, as someone who likes the strike-breaker who is Popeye's father. After being widowed, she has remarried a man who takes good care of her boarding house - until one day he disappears with all the money she had in the bank. Perhaps this event is what triggers her madness, a mixture of pyromania and paranoia.

This is not the Governor in Requiem who appears onstage in Act III but a "Governor of the State" who was once held in the Jefferson jail for thirty days after being sentenced for contempt of court (196). This episode is based on the real experience of former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo, a native of Oxford, who in 1922 spent the same thirty days in jail. (The Governor who does appear onstage has his own entry in the index: see Governor Henry.)

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the man who fills Popeye's car up in Dumfries a "mechanic"; he indicates which way Temple went when she got out of the car (140).

Lee Goodwin has a relationship with this woman while he is stationed in the Philippines. Ruby calls her a "nigger" when telling Temple about how Lee killed another American soldier in a fight over her (59), but since Ruby would be likely to use that term for any non-white person, Negro or Hispanic, it leaves open the question of the woman's racial identity.

All we know about this character in Sanctuary is that, when Horace asks the post office clerk at the University if he knows where Temple has gone, the clerk in reply asks him if he is "another detective" - suggesting that a detective of some kind has already been looking for Judge Temple's missing daughter (171). We don't even know if he is a private detective, or a policeman.

In Sanctuary Horace refers to Lee Goodwin's "good customers," the men of Yoknapatawpha who regularly bought whiskey illegally from him in the past but turned on him once he was arrested (127).

The taxi driver in "Death Drag" unsuccessfully tries to get Ginsfarb to tell him who jumps off the airplane in the barnstorming show.

Both times Ruby tells how the lawyer she hired got Lee out of prison in Sanctuary, she says he "got a congressman" (59, 278). Neither time does she go into any more details about the congressman.

The various college students mentioned in Sanctuary can be assorted into two groups: the ones Temple thinks about and the ones Horace sees. (1) Temple brings her classmates to mind twice during her ordeal at the Frenchman's place: first, while lying in the dark at the Old Frenchman's place, when she thinks of "the slow couples strolling toward the sound of the supper bell" (51); and then, while hiding in the barn from Pap, when she imagines them "leaving the dormitories in their new spring clothes" toward the bells of the churches (87).

On board the third and last train Horace takes on his way to Oxford in Sanctuary are two "young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests" (168). This one is unnamed, but together with "Shack" he outwits the train conductor and jokes crudely about women.

One of Temple's many suitors and dates in Sanctuary, this boy is the one that she went out with sometime before the story begins, making the unnamed girl who liked him mad because, Temple says, afterwards "he never asked her for another date" (57).

One of the three people in Sanctuary who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit is "a cigar-clerk" (311). We learn nothing about his testimony, or whether he is sincerely mistaken.

In Sanctuary six "liveried chauffeurs" - all presumably employed by a funeral home - drive the otherwise empty "Packard touring cars" that follow the hearse carrying Red's body to the cemetery (249). The odds are good that Faulkner imagined them as Negroes, like the other drivers and chauffeurs in his fictions, but in this text their race is not specified.

In Sanctuary this cab driver outside Miss Reba's slows down to see if Temple is looking for a ride.

This ambiguously defined group represents the "one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes" who "sometimes" visit Lee Goodwin after he's been convicted of murder and on some of those times bring him "baskets," presumably containing food (115).

In Sanctuary the second man who rides in the truck that carries the moonshine that Lee Goodwin makes from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis literally rides "shotgun" - as the truck pulls away from the Frenchman's place, "the second man lays a shotgun along the back of the seat" (22). He teases the driver about his impatience to get back to his woman in the city.

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the people who board with Popeye's mother "clients" (304). None are described in any detail, but we know they include some "old ones" and one man who finds two fires in his room. The day after firemen discover Popeye's grandmother with a fire in the attic, "all the clients left" (305).

In Sanctuary, while listening to State Senator Clarence Snopes talk about the life he lives in the capital of Jackson, Horace conjures up images of "bellboys" with "bulging jackets" (presumably contained alcoholic beverages) making deliveries to "hotel rooms" (175).

This fellow student at the barber school with Fonzo and Virgil is presumably the person in Sanctuary who, twelve days after they have started sleeping at Miss Reba's, tells Fonzo about the existence in Memphis of a house of prostitution. At any rate, he accompanies them to "that house" after Fonzo convinces Virgil to go (196).

The "two figures" Horace sees locked in an embrace in "an alley-mouth" in Memphis in Sanctuary are probably outside Miss Reba's house, though it is possible they exist only in his mind, which is reeling from his encounter with Temple inside the brothel and the story she tells him about being raped. The behavior of the couple certainly matches Horace's fascinated revulsion with sexuality: the man whispers "unprintable epithet after epithet" caressingly; the woman swoons with "voluptuous ecstasy" (221).

These soldiers in Sanctuary - presumably cavalrymen like Lee Goodwin - are returning to San Francisco from their deployment in the Philippines when Ruby asks them about what has happened to Lee. When she lets one of them pick her up, he paws her drunkenly while telling her about Lee killing another soldier in a fight over "that nigger woman" (277). American forces were first sent to the Philippines in 1898 to fight the Spanish, but soon were fighting against Philippine nationalists. The Philippines were an American territory from 1898 to 1946.

In Sanctuary, when Popeye is jailed in the unnamed Alabama town for murder, this group of men - referred to as "they" but presumably some combination of local policemen and the jailers - talk about how he'll send for his lawyer (310). It is also "they" who take Popeye to the place of his execution, and "adjust the rope" around his neck, "breaking his hair loose" (315).

Before finding Popeye guilty, the faceless jury in Alabama that hears the case against him in Sanctuary deliberates for "eight minutes" (312). "Eight minutes" is exactly how long it takes the jury in Jefferson to decide that Lee Goodwin is guilty too - also for a crime he did not commit (291).

The District Attorney who tries Popeye in Sanctuary believes the conviction was "too easy," and assumes Popeye will mount an appeal (312).

In Sanctuary only one of the three town boys - young men from Oxford instead of the university - who spend time with Gowan is named. This entry represents the one whom the narrative refers to as "the third" (30). Of the three, he seems the least affected either by all they drink or by the way Gowan boasts about his status as a "gentleman" (34).