Character Keys

The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in The Town: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's grotesque childhood is set against the normal lives of other Jefferson children, "all the boys and girls" who go to school (372) and who run, for example, "with random shouts back and forth at recess" (371). As they grow up, these children "fall into inevitable pairs," courting and marrying (374).

In Requiem for a Nun these are the "slaves" that John Sartoris brings with him, along with "gear and money," when he first arrives in Yoknapatawpha (35). In this novel none of them are given a name or any other individuality.

The "runaway slave" mentioned in Absalom! is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites).

In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the "revenue officers and deputies" whom Lucas remembers worked for the U.S. government (215, 61). Selling or buying alcohol was illegal by Mississippi state law, but in general the moonshiners who made and sold whiskey were prosecuted for evading federal tax regulations.

The "federal revenue agent" in The Reivers who went out to Ballenbaugh's to investigate the production and sale of moonshine whiskey and never returned worked for the Treasury Department (73). The presumption is that he was killed by the moonshiners. 'Revenuers' - as they were called - were charged with enforcing laws against making and distributing illegal liquor.

At noon in Rogers' grocery and restaurant in Flags in the Dust are two different groups of people: there are "a number of customers" in the grocery, not otherwise described, and in the restaurant "a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people" (119).

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, the other customers in the Memphis restaurant where Boon Hogganbeck and Quentin eat dinner listen to the drunken Boon's stories of Lion and Old Ben.

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished the "scrip dollar" that replaces Confederate money in Jefferson is "drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County" (66, 199). All we see of this functionary in the story is his "neat clerk's hand[writing]" (66, 199), but presumably he is one of the Northerners working in the defeated South for one of the Reconstruction agencies.

This white railroad employee's haste in getting off the train that carries Bryon Snopes' children to Jefferson in The Town is an early sign of trouble - a red flag of a different kind.

In Flags in the Dust this is the railroad employee who, once a week, delivers Belle's shrimp to Horace from "the door of the express car" (374-75). He assumes Horace must be using it for bait.

The Reivers refers to other prostitutes at Miss Reba's, besides Corrie and the two "ladies" whom Lucius meets at supper (106). Lucius can hear them meeting customers in the parlor on Saturday night. When the adult Lucius who is telling the story calls them "ladies" and "nymphs" (130), he is being pleasantly (rather than judgmentally) ironic.

Sanctuary spends a lot of time in Miss Reba's, but the women who work their as prostitutes remain largely offstage. At various times Temple, Fonzo and Virgil hear their laughter or the rustle of their clothes. In Chapter 21 they appear as "a plump blonde woman" (192), a woman "in a kimono" leaving "a trail of scent" (194) and a "blonde woman in a red dress" (198).

In "Monk" several guards watch over the inmates during the Governor's Pardon Board hearings.

In his hunt for Joe Christmas in Light in August Sheriff Kennedy is joined by a large posse. There are "thirty or forty" men waiting for the bloodhounds who arrive on the train the day after Joanna's body is discovered (296), and the narrative suggests this same group remains on the trail through the following week.

In "Wash" and again in Absalom! this is the group of armed white men who ride out with the sheriff to the shack where Wash lives to arrest him. They arrive as night falls, so Wash sees them mainly as moving shadows, but in his mind, at least, they are felt to be "men of Sutpen's own kind," the aristocratic leaders of the plantation South, the "arrogant and proud on the fine horses across the fine plantations" whom he had once looked up to, but who now seem to him not just "symbols of admiration and hope," but also "instruments of despair and grief" (547, 232).

In Light in August these policemen - from Little Rock or Memphis or perhaps some from each - come and get Joe Christmas and Doc Hines from the Little Rock orphanage and escort Joe by train back to the Memphis orphanage.

This is the "someone in the Square" in "My Grandmother Millard" whom the Yankee officer asks "where General Compson lives" (675).

In "That Evening Sun" these people witness Nancy's confrontation with Stovall and "tell about" it; the "ones that passed the jail" later that night hear Nancy singing and yelling and the jailer trying to make her stop (291).

In Light in August this passerby can't answer Hightower's question about the column of smoke.

In Light in August, when Hightower walks home after learning that the Sheriff is closing in on Christmas, he is so shaken that when "someone speaks to him in passing," he "does not even know" that he has been addressed (310). There's no indication of the gender of this passerby, but it's unlikely that a black would speak first in passing a white man, so we identify 'him' as white.

When Popeye's mother gets sick after her husband abandons her in Sanctuary, she goes to this "old negro woman" rather than a doctor, and the woman "tells her what was wrong" (304). The narrator doesn't tell us, but the problem is probably syphilis.

In both "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished these unnamed people, from various places and social ranks in the county, make up the white portion of the 'congregation' that assembles in the Episcopal Church to hear Rosa confess her sins - her campaign of stealing from the Yankees - and to enjoy the fruits of those sins, the mules and money she disperses into the community.

In "Red Leaves" the group that pursues the runaway servant does not include the tribe's old men - or its women and children.

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" all we are told about the man who is "establishing a ranch to breed native goats" in Yoknapatawpha is that he is "a Northerner" (139). The Hamlet is a little more specific: there Ratliff identifies him as a man from "Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio" (87). The novel is also a little more judgmental: as Ratliff explains to his friends that "You got to keep in mind he is a northerner. They does things different from us" (88).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (70, 71; 206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (70, 206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers carpetbaggers, the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War.

Another servant of Major de Spain in "Barn Burning," described only as "the Negro youth on a fat bay carriage horse" (12); he rides behind De Spain, carrying the rug that Ab Snopes has soiled.

Much to Mink's surprise in The Mansion, this "big Negro woman" (305) is a congregant of Goodyhay's church. Albert explains to Mink that "her son had it too just like she was a white woman" - "it" is never clearly explained, but probably means that this son was killed during World War II (305).

In Flags in the Dust the wife of the black farmer in whose barn Bayard spends his last night in Yoknapatawpha feeds him breakfast and dinner on Christmas Day, but she herself is not named or described.

This is the "negro in a passing wagon" who gives Young John Sartoris a lift back toward town after John crashes the hot air balloon in Flags in the Dust (68).

In Light in August Joe Christmas hails this man as he passes by on a quiet country road to ask "what day of the week" it is (337).

In "A Justice" Doom and the Chocktaws own a sizable number of black slaves. Four of them are briefly traded - along with the six slaves he has recently won on the steamboat from New Orleans - to two unnamed white men for the grounded riverboat which Doom then has moved by slaves to his plantation.

These are the "other Negroes" mentioned by Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" - other than the "grooms" who tend to the horses and dogs - on the Harriss plantation (234). Presumably these are the servants inside the big house that Mr. Harriss built, but no other details about them are provided.

In "Smoke" the servants of Old Anse Holland witness much of the tension between their master and his sons. On the night Young Anse leaves home for good, the scene was “of such violence that the Negro servants all fled the house and scattered for the night” (5).

In "Shall Not Perish" these Negro servants appear figuratively in a description of "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war. The narrator establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow.

In Absalom! this "bright gigantic negress" accompanies Bon's wife and son during the visit to Sutpen's in 1870; she carries a "silk cushion" for Bon's wife to kneel on and holds the hand of the "little boy" (157).

In her account of Nancy's arrest in Requiem for a Nun, Temple describes in moving detail the "Negro prisoners" whose hands can be seen lying between the bars of the jail's windows. Initially she describes them as "the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murdresses too," but her representation of them also includes the kinds of labor and domestic work they perform (plowing and rocking cradles and so on) as a crucial part of Yoknapatawpha's economy (155). She compares them to the more privileged "white persons" (155).

This "drugstore porter" appears only peripherally in Intruder in the Dust, when Chick speculates that the white people who were waiting to see Lucas lynched ran away "to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco" (191).

While walking through Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes notes this "Negro porter" handling luggage at the Holston House (37).

According to Bayard's narrative in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, this Negro porter at the Holston House is "too old even to be free" (71, 207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote. The man takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel.

In Go Down, Moses Lucas recalls this earlier source of competition for his moonshine business. Lucas takes a kind of pleasure in remembering how he got this man sentenced to prison.

The narrator of Light in August identifies the black man who rides to the Sheriff's house in Jefferson "on a saddleless mule" to report Christmas' violent disruption of the "revival meeting" at "the negro church" only as "the messenger" (322, 323). He is anxious to convince the Sheriff that the blacks had not been "bothering" Christmas beforehand (324).

This is the "inscrutable" man in Light in August - "either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth" (435) - who takes Lucas Burch's note to the sheriff. A bit later, this man points Byron Bunch toward Burch.

In The Reivers this man emerges from the crowd to help Luster carry the wounded unnamed black girl to Dr. Peabody's office.

Neither the Negro man whom Boon shoots in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses nor the cause of the quarrel between the men is explained. In "Lion" Quentin describes the man in terms that, like the entire episode, will make a 21st century sensibility wince: "They said he was a bad nigger, but I don't know" (189). When the scene was revised for the novel, the third-person narrator calls him a "negro" instead (223). In both texts this man is armed with "a dollar-and-a-half mail order pistol" that misfires (189, 223).

The mammy who takes care of Narcissa and Bayard's new-born son at the end of Flags in the Dust is referred to only as "the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours" (395).

In "Red Leaves" this enslaved woman travels as a maid with the West Indian woman, Issetibbeha's mother, on her trip from New Orleans to Doom's plantation.

When Chick sees lights in Gavin Stevens' office in Intruder in the Dust, he thinks that sometimes "the janitor forgot to turn them off" (207).

In The Hamlet this "negro man" warns Mrs. Houston to stay away from the stallion that kills her (238); after her death, he cooks for Houston.