Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust, this railroad worker - referred to by Simon simply as a "section hand" (7) - is apparently the only witness to Young Bayard's 1919 return to Jefferson from World War I. It seems that he told Simon about it, and Simon in turn tells Old Bayard.

This is the imposing-looking Pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Flags in the Dust who leads the delegation that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris, requesting him to pay back to the church the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund. The narrator describes him as "a huge, neckless negro in a Prince Albert coat . . . with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye" (282).

One of the "three negroes" in Flags in the Dust who accompany Young Bayard on his drunken trip to the neighboring college town to serenade the co-eds. He plays either the bass viol or the guitar.

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church who call at the Sartoris plantation in Flags in the Dust seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church who call at the Sartoris plantation in Flags in the Dust seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.

The middle child in the family of black sharecroppers in Flags in the Dust who let Young Bayard sleep in their barn and share their Christmas dinner; of the gender of this child the narrative says only, and strangely, "The second one might have been either or anything" (364).

One of the three black men in Flags in the Dust (the others are Richard, and an unnamed "half-grown negro boy") who live with the MacCallums, presumably as servants or tenant farmers, or he may be the "negro who assists" Henry make moonshine whiskey (335).

"Negress" is not a term the narrator of Flags in the Dust uses for any other female Negro, so it's not clear why he uses it the one time he mentions the black maid at the Beard boarding house. She is helping Mrs. Beard serve breakfast at the boarding house. She is also described as "slatternly" (324).

At the livery stable where Rafe takes Bayard in Flags in the Dust are a number of "onlookers" (129) sitting "on top of the gate" or "leaning with crossed arms upon it" (126). Presumably they are admiring the stallion in the lot, though when its runs away with Bayard by crashing right through the gate they "hurl themselves to safety" (129).

This is the serviceman in Flags in the Dust whom Montgomery Ward Snopes cons into declaring him medically unfit for military service by holding "a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit" all the way from Jefferson to Memphis (167).

In Flags in the Dust the insignia on this marine's uniform identifies him as belonging to the Second Marine Division, which saw heavy combat during World War I; he expresses his contempt for Horace's Y.M.C.A. uniform, which marks him as a non-combatant, by "making a vulgar sound of derogation" and spitting, "not exactly at Horace's feet, and not exactly anywhere else" (158-59).

These are "the little girls next door" with whom Little Belle plays in Flags in the Dust; they listen "with respect coldly concealed" when she tells them about the "prettier town" in which she used to live with "her real daddy" (378).

This "horse trader by profession" in Flags in the Dust has the usual unscrupulousness of that profession (127). The fact that "he was usually engaged in litigation with the railroad company over the violent demise of some of his stock by its agency" makes him very similar to I.O. Snopes in "Mule in the Yard." (In Flags in the Dust I.O. runs Flem's restaurant.)

The anonymous hillman in Flags in the Dust who moves into Jefferson and builds the house Belle Mitchell lives in came to town with his unnamed and unenumerated "women-folks" (24). In their new lives these women obviously attempt to live like 'ladies': they spend the mornings sitting on the veranda and the afternoons riding about wearing "colored silks" (24). But after two years, they return to Frenchman's Bend and, the narrator speculates, their original 'poor white' identities.

One of the three black males who are present in the MacCallum household when Young Bayard arrives there near the end of Flags in the Dust. His role in the family or on the family's land is not clear.

In Flags in the Dust this "group of negroes" scatters when Bayard and the runaway stallion race down the lane from the livery stable (129).

In Flags in the Dust, the "governor" of South Carolina at the start of the Civil War - when the state became the first to secede from the Union, occupied Fort Moultrie and "refused to surrender it" (11), and then began hostilities by attacking Fort Sumter - was Frances Pickens; descended from a famous Carolina family, he strongly supported the creation and the cause of the Confederacy.

Mentioned a couple times in Flags in the Dust, briefly, in the history of her "lovers" that Joan Heppleton provides for Horace Benbow, this man (probably not named "Heppleton," but not otherwise named) was in his fifties when she married him at eighteen. Together they went to Hawaii just before or during the First World I; after she left him for another man, they divorced and he "made a settlement on her" (322).

Mentioned only briefly in Flags in the Dust, while the narrative is summing up Joan Heppleton's life, the man who is both her and Belle Mitchell's father is identified with the quality of "bitter reserve" (322). The reference to him in Sanctuary adds the detail that he lives "in Kentucky"; Belle stays there with him, offstage, more most of the novel (260).

Although Flags in the Dust does not describe this "youth" in any detail, it does specify the "practical joke" for which he was expelled "from the state university": "he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls' dormitory" (186).

The "servant" in Flags in the Dust who "methodically" packs up Horace Benbow's possessions as he is getting ready to leave Oxford to return to America (178).

When in Flags in the Dust Old Bayard finds his ancestor's rapier in the chest of family relics, he thinks of the first Sartoris in the new world, raising tobacco and fighting "his stealthy and simple neighbors" (88). That ancestor lived in Carolina (whether North or more probably South is never specified), and the adjectives "stealthy and simple" make it almost certain that he is thinking about the Indians who were ab-originally on that scene.

In Flags in the Dust, these are the two "infant children" - sex not specified - in the "family of country people" that moves into Jefferson during the First World War (72). Since their mother is pregnant again, "infant" presumably means something like "less than three years old."

These are Bayard's teachers at the University of Virginia, and Johnny's at Princeton, who in Flags in the Dust are informed about the kinds of trouble that the twins get into in New York City.

The only native American character mentioned in Flags in the Dust, this "Choctaw woman" gave Will Falls' grandmother the recipe for an ointment "nigh a hundred and thutty years ago" (227). That would be around 1790, at which time the Choctaw was one of the major tribes living in the southeastern U.S, including Mississippi. They inhabit Yoknapatawpha in Faulkner's earliest fictions. However, historically the tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha was the Chickasaw, and in his later fictions Faulkner uses that name instead.

In Flags in the Dust this carnival employee is mentioned in Narcissa's account of the time Johnny Sartoris flew over Yoknapatawpha in a balloon. John does that when ptomaine poisoning makes the man to ill to fly the balloon himself.

In Flags in the Dust the men who own businesses or have offices or work in stores on the Square appear several times, specifically separated out from the larger population of Jefferson. They most frequently are associated with either Old Bayard or Jenny Du Pre.

In Flags in the Dust this man sits in front of Rogers' restaurant, "a man of at least forty" who is wearing a motley collection of uniforms and playing a guitar and harmonica (which the narrative calls a "mouthorgan," 118). The narrative describes what he plays as "a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythymic as a mathematical formula but without music" (118). The tin cup at his feet contains "a dime and three pennies" (118).

In Flags in the Dust this is the employee inside the train's baggage car. His race is not specified, and his reply to Horace's concern about the fragility of his glass blowing equipment makes it hard to determine it. Linguistically he sounds 'black': "All right, colonel. . . . we ain't hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us" (157). But his unsubmissive attitude toward the white Horace suggests he is 'white' himself.

In Flags in the Dust Young Bayard mentions this major during his talk with Rafe MacCallum "about the war"; the memory features a fight in "the Leicester lounge" in which "the Anzac lost two teeth" and Bayard himself "got a black eye" (124). The fight may have been over "two ladies," and may have been between Bayard and the Major, but none of that is made clear. Faulkner may have meant this character to be the same as the Australian captain whose teeth Bayard knocks out in a bar in London (cf.

This very peripheral character is mentioned in Flags in the Dust in one of Monaghan's anecdotes about his experiences with Bayard Sartoris in World War I as the "A.P.M." whose whistle Comyn took and used to start a melee in an Amiens night club called the Cloche-Clos (387). The Provost Marshals ran the army's military police.

In its brief account of Horace's term as a Rhodes Scholar in England, Flags in the Dust mentions the "fellow-countrymen" with whom he occasionally travels on the "Continent" (177).

The "fellow recruit" in Flags in the Dust who calls Buddy MacCallum "Virge" during their training at a camp in Arkansas; in response Buddy fights him "without anger" for "seven minutes" (355).

Sally Wyatt's older sister is named Sophia in Flags in the Dust; she runs the household in which the three elderly Wyatt sisters live "in a capable shrewish fashion" (175).

One of the Confederate officers who rides with J.E.B. Stuart in Flags in the Dust; it is on his horse that the captured Union Major is carried. (He does not seem to be related in any way to the Wyatt sisters who live next door to the Benbows in Jefferson.)

In Flags in the Dust the woman who owns the boarding house in Jefferson where the two carpetbaggers are staying is named Mrs. Winterbottom. According to Will Falls' story about the event, she stands "gapin' after him with her mouth open" when Colonel Sartoris goes up to their room and shoots them both (243). (The third time Faulkner tells this story, in "Skirmish at Satoris" and again in The Unvanquished, the hotel is owned by Mrs. Holston.)

Manfred von Richthofen, better known as "The Red Baron," shot down more planes than any other aviator in World War I. Young Bayard tells his grandfather and great-great-aunt that the German pilot who shot down Johnny was a "pupil of Richthofen's" (43).

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was one of the most famous and flamboyant Confederate officers, in command of Lee's cavalry for most of the Civil War. In Flags in the Dust he and "Carolina" Bayard Sartoris, Stuart's friend and aide-de-camp, embody the spirit of chivalry and romantic daring that the narrative identifies with pre-Modern life. Aunt Jenny, who tells the highly-colored story about him and Bayard as mythic heroes, says she danced with Stuart once, before the war, in Baltimore.

In Flags in the Dust Sol is the porter who helps Horace with his luggage when he returns to Jefferson from France.

In Flags in the Dust Sibleigh serves in France with the Sartoris twins in the Royal Air Force during World War I. He agrees to serve as flying bait to lure Ploeckner into Bayard's sights. (He also appears in the non-Yoknapatawpha fiction "With Honor and Dispatch.")

This is the named man among the "two negro men" and the boy in the MacCallum kitchen in Flags in the Dust (336). Mandy calls him "Richud" (337). Buddy calls him "Dick" (338). So it seems likely that his full name is Richard, though neither that nor his role in the household or on the family's land is spelled out.

The only named one among the three black musicians who accompany Young Bayard, Hub and Mitch on their trip to the neighboring college town to serenade young women in Flags in the Dust, Reno plays the clarinet. He loses his hat when Bayard steps on the gas of his roadster.

During the Civil War, General Pope was the general in command of the Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run in September, 1862. The story Jenny tells in Flags in the Dust about her brother Bayard accompanying General J.E.B. Stuart's raiding party to Pope's headquarters in Virginia in April, 1862, forms a mythic part of the Sartoris inheritance. In April 1862, however, Pope was in fact in Mississippi. It was his success there that led Lincoln soon afterwards to bring Pope east and put him in command of the North's Army of Virginia.

Loosh Peabody married a woman he "courted for fourteen years before he was able to marry her" (400). She lived somewhere "forty miles" away from Jefferson, outside Yoknapatawpha, and the demands of his patients meant that Peabody could not even see her as often as once a year. We can infer she is patient and loyal, but all the narrator of Flags in the Dust says is that her "only child" is Lucius Peabody, Jr. (400).

In Flags in the Dust "Pappy" is the "older negro" (213) of the two who rescue Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge and carry him home; he is suspicious both of meddling with a white man and of the automobile. The "younger negro" is his son, John Henry (213).

One of the two "young" white men (the other is Hub) in Flags in the Dust who spend an evening with Young Bayard, along with Reno and two other young black men, drinking, driving and serenading ladies out of and in Jefferson. Mitch sings "Goodnight, Ladies" in a "true, oversweet tenor" voice (143). He is a "freight agent" (140), and may be the same character as Mitch Ewing in "Hair."

Mandy is the only woman who lives at the MacCallum place in Flags in the Dust. She cooks for the white family, although the narrator describes Henry MacCallum as "a better cook now than Mandy" (335). Her size and shape are indicated by the narrator's description of the way her "homely calico expanse" fills the doorway between the house and the kitchen (336).

Pappy's son, the "younger" of the two Negroes who help Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge in Flags in the Dust; he treats Bayard's broken body with great gentleness.

In Flags in the Dust Hub is the young farmer who provides the illegal moonshine that fuels the road trip Young Bayard takes to Oxford. He is married, and has a sister or a daughter named Sue, but his character seems summed up when he tells Suratt that he "dont give a damn" if anyone tells where the whiskey came from (138). He is clearly a different character from any of the "Hub Hampton"s who are county sheriffs.