Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust Frankie is the youngest guest at Belle Mitchell's tennis party, and the first woman in Jefferson who has bobbed her hair.

Flags in the Dust begins with "old man Falls" (3). During the Civil War, Will Falls served with Colonel John Sartoris' irregular outfit. The stories he tells Old Bayard about that past serve to fetch "the spirit of the dead man" into the novel's post World War I present (3), and the old Choctaw salve with which he successfully treats Bayard's wen reinforces the role he plays as a connection to the old South. He lives frugally in the county poor farm, regularly walks the three miles into town, and his "faded overalls" give off a "clean dusty smell" (3).

"Vardaman" is mentioned twice in Flags in the Dust, once by Aunt Jenny and once by Deacon Rogers (62, 122). Both of them express admiration for his character and politics. Known as "The Great White Chief," James K. Vardaman served one term as Governor of Mississippi (1904-1908) and one term in the United States Senate (1913-1919). A militant segregationist, he vowed to lynch every African American in the state if that ever became necessary. He opposed U.S.

"Mister Joe Butler" is one of the two characters whom Byron Snopes invents in Flags in the Dust in his attempt to deceive Virgil Beard about the nature of the anonymous letters he is sending Narcissa (108). He is supposed to live in St. Louis.

Uncle Bird is one of the delegation from the Second Baptist Church that calls on Old Bayard Sartoris to recover the $67.40 that Simon embezzled from the building fund.

At the Sartoris Thanksgiving dinner in Flags in the Dust, Dr. Peabody mentions Abe as one of the gillies who help the gentlemen who come to fish his pond. ("Gilly" is a Scottish term for a servant who assists a fisherman.) When asked "how many [other black retainers] have you got," Peabody says "six or seven" adults, and an unspecified number of "scrubs" (i.e. children), but they are not named (303).

In The Unvanquished Mrs. Wilkins and her husband give Bayard a home while he is pursuing a law degree in Oxford, Mississippi. She is a "small" woman whose little gestures ("she just put her hands on my shoulders") reveal her big compassion for Bayard (215).

In The Unvanquished Bayard evokes "the men who have written" of the kind of woman he identifies Drusilla with at this point in the story: the "woman of thirty" (228). Although no writers are named, Balzac was one of Faulkner's favorite writers, and he may be be thinking of the character Julie in Honoré de Balzac's 1842 novel La femme de trente ans (A Woman of Thirty).

In The Unvanquished Bayard assumes this "watchman" or "picquet" must have been watching to report his arrival at Sartoris to the other veterans of "Father's old troop" (232); he does not actually appear in the novel.

In The Unvanquished just enough is said about the third partner in the railroad owned by John Sartoris and Ben Redmond to make him mysterious: "he and his name both had vanished," Bayard says, "in the fury of the conflict" between the other two partners (224).

In a passage Faulkner added to "Retreat" when the story was published as a chapter in The Unvanquished, Bayard describes the unconventional way Buck and Buddy treat the large number of enslaved people they inherited from their father. The two white slave-owners move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" (46), and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night.

In The Unvanquished, the "some northern people" - presumably bankers or businessmen - sell John Sartoris a locomotive on credit (225).

In The Unvanquished Bayard describes "the Patroller (sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off)" having caught some of the Satoris slaves away from the plantation (16). In the antebellum South patrollers watched at night to capture any slaves who were out of their quarters without authorization from their owners, and pursued fugitive slaves.

In The Unvanquished these men are originally depicted as the "row of feet" that Bayard sees propped on the porch railing when he arrives at Holston House to confront Redmond (245). Afterward, when Bayard leaves the hotel, this same group "raises their hats" out of respect for him (251).

In "Retreat" as both a story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, these townspeople "stop along the walk, like they always did," to listen to Uncle Buck shouting his praise for Colonel Sartoris (21, 51). In the novel version, Faulkner adds a phrase that may signal a change in the way we are meant to regard Buck: "not smiling so he could see it" (51). And in the novel, the people in Jefferson appear again in "An Odor of Verbena" to watch as Bayard makes his way to Redmond's office, following him with their "remote still eyes" (247).

In The Unvanquished this woman - even though she is dirt poor (literally, as she lives in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills") - maintains her pride by throwing back the money John Sartoris offers her after he shot her husband (221).

In The Unvanquished these are the children of the "hill man" whom Colonel Sartoris shoots after the War; they live with their mother in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221).

In a passage added to the "Retreat" chapter of The Unvanquished, Bayard describes these poor whites as "the people whom the niggers called 'white trash'" - though he himself refers to them several times as "white trash" too (48-49). Their low status is defined in part by the fact that they "owned no slaves" (49). They farm "little patches of poor hill land" near the McCaslin place and in some cases "live worse than the slaves on the big plantation" (49). According to Bayard, they "look on Uncle Buck and Buddy like Deity Himself" (49).

In a passage added to "Raid" as a chapter of The Unvanquished, Drusilla tells Ringo about the race between two railroad trains, one driven by Confederates and the other by Union forces, who rushed past Hawkhurst before the track was destroyed by Yankee troops.

In "The Unvanquished" and then in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, this auditor is mentioned by the Union lieutenant whose men take down a mule pen fence while re-taking stolen Union livestock. The lieutenant gives Rosa a voucher worth $10 to pay for the damaged fence, then asks her not to forge a higher amount because, as he says, "if in about four months the auditor should find a warrant in the records for a thousand dollars to Mrs Rosa Millard, I would have to make it good" (91, 147).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, Louvinia mentions "Unc Few Mitchell" to help Bayard and Ringo appreciate the performance Colonel Sartoris puts on for the Union troops who had ridden up to the plantation in search of him. According to her, he was "born loony" (34, 73). From the way she talks about him, it seems very likely that he is another enslaved person on the Sartoris plantation, but that is not explicitly said.

The "Hilliard at the livery stable" in The Unvanquished Oxford is presumably the owner who lets Ringo talk him out of a good horse for his long ride (217).

The John Sevier mentioned by Aunt Jenny in The Unvanquished was a frontiersmen whose adventures made him a hero "to small boys or fool young women" (244).

The historical figure William Barksdale, mentioned in The Unvanquished, was born in Tennessee but was serving as Congressman from Mississippi at the start of the Civil War. He resigned that office to fight for the Confederacy. He participated in many battles in Virginia and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863.

All we know about this Confederate brigade commander mentioned in The Unvanquished is that when John Sartoris returns to Mississippi after being demoted by his troops, "Uncle Buddy" McCaslin apparently stays behind as a sergeant "in Tennant's brigade in Virginia" (51).

The specific chain gang that Mink works on while at Parchman's in The Mansion consists of eleven men altogether, who go to and from the "mess hall to eat" and the cotton field where they are forced to work "shackled to the same chain" (105). The three who are named - Mink himself, Stillwell and Barron - are all white, and they live inside the penitentiary in "a detached wire-and-canvas-and-plank hut," so it seems safe to assume that in the segregrated South, all eleven are white, but that is an assumption. The gang tries to kill Mink after he objects to their plan to escape.

In The Hamlet the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes are described as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285).

In "Wash" these enslaved black men laugh at Wash for remaining in Yoknapatawpha during the Civil War. They would make fun of him with the question "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).

Two of The Unvanquished stories refer to but don't name a Union general in command of the forces in the area of Yoknapatawpha. In "Ambuscade" this general is mentioned by Sergeant Harrison, who heard "the general" in command of the larger unit to which his cavalry troop belongs say that "if he had enough horses, he wouldn’t always care whether there was anybody to ride them or not" (13, 30).

When Issetibbeha takes over the tribe in "Red Leaves" he puts the "young Negroes" in the cabins to "mate" (320) and produce children whom he can sell.

In "Red Leaves" this stripling attends to Moketubbe on his litter; his pert manner of speaking annoys the older men Three Basket and Louis Berry.

In "Red Leaves" Doom had a slave as a personal servant. At his death many years earlier, this unnamed slave also ran away to avoid being killed and buried with his master - but he too was pursued and captured.

The captain of the slave ship that carries the servant "to America" in "Red Leaves" is described as "drunken" and from "New England" (330). During the voyage, he reads the Bible to the slaves he is transporting.

This white man is described in "Red Leaves" as an "itinerant minister and slave trader" (318). While passing through the Indians' plantation "on a mule" that also carries "a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky," he marries Doom and his West Indian wife (318).

During his flight in "Red Leaves," the servant comes face to face with this Indian on "a footlog across a slough" (334). The Indian's appearance is explicitly contrasted with the servant's: the black man is "gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate," the Indian is "thick, soft-looking, the apparent embodiment of the ultimate and the supreme reluctance and inertia" (334). He "makes no move" while the servant rushes away (334).

The funeral ceremonies for Issetibbeha in "Red Leaves" include "almost a hundred guests" who travel in wagons and on foot to the plantation from elsewhere (331) - when the food runs out "the guests returned home and came back the next day with more food" (336), which may mean they are Indians from other tribes or clans. They are "decorous, quiet, patient" (331), and the descriptions of them repeatedly mention the "stiff European finery" and the "bright, stiff, hard finery" they wear for the occasion (331, 339).

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "dressing a fowl" while listening to the unnamed old man tell the stories of the olden days (323).

In "Red Leaves" this group of Indians meets Doom's West Indian wife and accompanies her from the steamboat to his plantation.

In "Red Leaves" these runners and couriers provide information to Moketubbe during the hunt for the servant.

In "Red Leaves" the tribe's women stay on the plantation with the old men and children rather than participate in the chase after the servant.

In "Red Leaves" Three Basket is about sixty years old and, like Louis Berry, described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313). He wears "an enameled snuffbox" as an earring (313). Apparently he is a kind of overseer on the Indian plantation. Along with Louis Berry, he spends six days tracking down a Issetibbeha's servant, often remembering Doom's death, which was the last time a runaway slave had to be captured and killed.

In "Red Leaves" the character named Had-Two-Fathers appears only once, briefly, as one of the men who tell Moketubbe he should take off the red slippers (336). He is not the character Faulkner created later, also named Had-Two-Fathers but better known as Sam Fathers; this later character will play important roles in seven of the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The historical Madame de Pompadour who is mentioned in "Red Leaves" was the primary mistress of Louis XV, an 18th century King of France. Issetibbeha returns home from France with some furniture reputedly owned by Louis XV.

In "Red Leaves" Louis Berry is one of the Indians who leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - a task which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. Louis is described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313).

Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "an old man in a shabby brown overcoat" sailing a toy boat beside the children (316).

In "Knight's Gambit" the Negroes who live along the railroad tracks in Jefferson are identified only by their "alien yet inviolably durable" homes, the "Negro cabins" Charles sees out the window of the train bringing him home (252-53).

In "The Old People" these Negroes live and work on the narrator's family farm, probably as tenant farmers. The cabins they live in may once have been part of the slave quarters. The racial and economic realities of Yoknapatawpha require them to put on the semblance of "servility," to have "recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth . . . to sustain [a buffer] between themselves and white men" on whom they depend for their subsistence (203).

This generic 'wagon driver' is mentioned in the summary description of the fifteen years Joe Christmas spends on "the street" (223) in Light in August. Joe's long strange trip is epitomized by all the rides that he begs on "country wagons" with the "driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask" (224).

In Light in August this good-natured man gives Lena Grove a ride from Varner's Store to Jefferson; on the outskirts of the town, they see the smoke from Joanna Burden's burning house.