Character Keys

According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). Although this is put indirectly, it is likely that the "lawyer" and the secretary it refers to exist.

In all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy the jury finds Mink guilty without much deliberation. In The Hamlet they are described as a "grave" and impassive "conclave of grown men" (368). (Only white males served on juries in Mississippi at the time of the story. By law, women were not allowed to serve on Mississippi juries until 1968. Negroes were not legally prohibited from being jurors, but until even later it was common practice to keep them off most juries.)

In "Tomorrow," ten of the jurors who serve with Mr. Fentry in the Bookwright trial are unnamed, but they are described as "farmers and store-keepers" (91) - and unanimous in their desire to acquit Bookwright.

Mink Snopes' murder trial is described, at least briefly, in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Though the judge who presides over the trial is not named until the third volume - in The Mansion he is referred to, once, as "Judge Brummage" (48) - there's no reason not to assume that Faulkner imagined the same person on the bench in all three accounts.

The "JUDGE" who pronounces Nancy's death sentence at the start of the play in Requiem for a Nun is not described at all (40). The phrase "his gavel" confirms the assumption that he is male - as are all the many judges in the Yoknapatawpha fictions; those other judges are also all 'white' and 'upper class,' which is the basis for our other assumptions about this judge (41).

These men are the "nameless and faceless" clientele of the unnamed Galveston prostitute with whom Houston lives with for seven years in The Hamlet. He imagines them as a "blight" upon her reproductive system, "the Babylonian interdict by heaven forever against reproduction" (236).

When thinking about money in The Sound and the Fury, Jason is reminded of the local merchant, "a man right here in Jefferson [who] made a lot of money selling rotten goods to niggers" (194). This man hoards his money until he gets sick, when he "joins the church and buys himself a Chinese missionary" as a means to his own salvation (194).

Throughout all the oddities of Mrs. Gant's and Zilphia's lives in "Miss Zilphia Gant," the family dressmaking shop continues to "do well" with the women of Jefferson who can afford to have hand-tailored clothes (378, 381). After Zilphia returns to Jefferson with a story about a second marriage and a girl she calls her daughter, "the ladies" - as the narrator calls the shop's clients - "never tired of fondling little Zilphia," as he calls the girl (381).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished, Bayard says that "all the ladies in Jefferson" (58) - in the second text this is revised to "all the women in Jefferson" (188) - travel out to the Sartoris plantation on several occasions: to confront Drusilla for her unlady-like behavior and to attend the wedding that will ceremonialize her return to their fold. The first time they appear, there are "fourteen of them," though that total includes Martha Habersham (63, 194). They all seem both curious and outraged by what they see.

in Requiem for a Nun there are several specific references to the "ladies" of a contemporary Jefferson. A hundred years after the town's naming, two ladies clubs argue over whether "to change the name back to Habersham" (7). (This group also appears in "A Name for the City," 202.) And it is only "a few irreconciliable old ladies" - in other words, ladies who have not reconciled themselves to the South's defeat in the Civil War - who refuse to forget the fact that during the war "a United States military force" burned the town Square (37).

In "Dry September," these are the young women of Jefferson are seen by Minnie Cooper when she goes out alone in the afternoons, as they stroll downtown "with their delicate, silken heads and thin, awkward arms and conscious hips" (175). The narrative calls them "cousins" of Minnie Cooper, using quotation marks to indicate that they are not actual relatives (175).

The white children of Jefferson don't directly appear anywhere in Intruder in the Dust, but Chick thinks of them three times. He remembers when he and the other "children on [his] street" played a card game with "an old lady" who lived nearby (58). And he notes the absence of the children who should have been on their porches on Sunday morning, "fresh and scrubbed for Sunday school with clutched palm-sweaty nickels" - but "perhaps by mutual consent" Sunday school has been cancelled (38).

A "shabby man" with "intense, visionary eyes" in Flags in the Dust, he thinks he has perfected a new prototype airplane (384). When he complains that none of "you damned yellow-livered pilots" will test it for him, Young Bayard agrees to fly it (387).

This "infant" is the child of the "countrywoman" who in Sanctuary cannot find a seat on the train that takes Horace to Oxford (170).

There are various groups of hunters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. These "hunters" are the essentially transcendent community created by the narrator at the start of the chapter called "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In this passage, "hunters" refers not to any specific characters but to an exalted meta-cultural and spiritual category of "men": they are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181).

There are four sets of hunters in "Lion": 1) the members of the hunting party who are not specifically named; 2) the narrator's generic hunters who "love" hunting dogs (184); 3) the "other people" - men from nearby but not necessarily among the annual hunting party featured in the story - who killed "deer and bear" on the land owned by Major de Spain, "on Major de Spain's courtesy" (186); and 4) the men from Jefferson who arrive at the hunt annually for the last day, the day set aside for "driving" Old Ben (189).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of hunters. This group consists of the the men with whom Ike McCaslin hunted in the past, when game was still plentiful in Yoknapatawpha. Ike can remember how they "shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skills and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs" (267, 319). Some of these men are the fathers and grandfathers of young men in the story's present-day hunting party.

An unspecified number of white men are present at Major de Spain’s annual hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Ratliff comments indirectly on the size of the group, saying he was not surprised that Luke Provine would be there because "this here would be the biggest present gathering of men in the county, let alone the free eating and whisky" (68). As alluded to in the title, some may be bear hunters, while others are referred to by Major de Spain as "shotgun fellows on the deer stands" (68). When not hunting, the camaraderie of camp life includes eating, drinking, and playing poker.

In The Mansion the proprietor of the Pascagoula hotel knows Linda.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun the enslaved wife of the "waiter-groom-hostler" at Holston's tavern is the establishment's cook (208, 14); although a good bit of the story takes place in the tavern's kitchen, she herself is never seen.

This "groom" delivers Chick's horse Highboy to the Mallison house in Intruder in the Dust (123). This is the kind of job that is often performed by blacks in Faulkner's fiction, but in this case there is no hint of an African American dialect in his voice.

In The Sound and the Fury on both Saturday and Sunday (the first and fourth sections of the novel) various groups of golfers are described playing on the course beside the Compson place. Consistent with the severe conceptual limitations of Benjy's mind, his descriptions of them are very confusing: "they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit" (3). When the third person narrator describes the same actions in the fourth section, it becomes easy to see who is there and what they are doing: Benjy and Luster "watched the foursome . . . move to the tee and drive" (315).

In Sanctuary Temple mentions this young woman while talking to Horace: "a girl" who "went abroad one summer" and after she came back told Temple about chastity belts (217). There's no way to determine if she was a fellow college student or a friend from Jackson.

In Requiem for a Nun the "tank gun" that serves as a monument to World War II was "captured from a regiment of Germans in an African desert" (194).

Only one member of Clarence Snopes' gang is mentioned separately in either "By the People" or The Mansion: his "lieutenant," the "second-in-command in the old gang" (89, 330). He is not described in more detail, but when he "tries to take advantage of their old relationship" after Snopes becomes a constable, Snopes' treatment of him is described as "ruthless and savage" (130, 330).

In Sanctuary these firemen arrive at Popeye's mother's boarding house in Florida to discover his grandmother in the attic, "stamping out a fire of excelsior in the center of the floor" (305). The last time they arrive there, the house is engulfed in flames.

in The Town the class of "nameless tenants and croppers" is referred to by Gavin Stevens in his account of Flem Snopes' desire to undermine Manfred de Spain. Although the context is a long way from their actual lives, these people who farm land they do not own are described as "unfutured, barely-solvent one-bale tenant farmers [who] pervaded, covered thinly the whole county and on [whom] in fact the entire cotton economy of the county was founded and supported" (293).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses Gavin Stevens notes that "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260, 357). Although he doesn't say so explicitly, the rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Stevens is sure "they wouldn't" tell Mollie about her grandson's fate, even if they ever "hear about it" (260, 357).

The Negroes who work the land at the Harriss plantation are variously referred to in "Knight's Gambit" as "croppers" and "tenants" (163). As the owners of the land, both Mrs. Harriss' father and her husband use the tenant system, which became widespread across the South in the aftermath of Emancipation. The narrative notes that Mrs. Harriss' father managed the system in such a way that "a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared" to drive the white family's carriage - an "old battered Victoria" - whenever his daughter wanted to go to Jefferson (155). Mr.

As Chick and Aleck Sander travel to the Edmonds place in the morning of "the first winter cold-snap" in Intruder in the Dust (4), they pass small farms where everyone seems to be involved in the same two activities. The women, wearing "sunbonnets" or "men's old felt hats," are boiling water in big kettles, while the men, "with crokersack aprons tied with wire over their overalls," prepare to slaughter hogs (4). (A croker sack is a burlap bag.)

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," these farmers from the countryside around Jefferson tether their teams in the lot beside the Gants' shop when they come into town "on market days" (371). While "hitching or unhitching" their horses and mules, they see Zilphia's "small wan face" behind the bars on the window of her room; they have "heard about" what Mrs. Gant did to her husband, and they discuss the sickly child without any sign of compassion (371).

In The Hamlet this man owns the farm where Ike Snopes finds food for his cow. He is a "man past middleage" with a "grim and puritanical affinity for abstinence and endurance" (211); angry at the loss of his feed and a feed basket, he angrily pursues Ike through the woods.

In "Dry September" the man who owns the "abandoned brick-kiln" once used the land around it as a pasture, but he stopped doing that after "one of his mules" went missing in one of the property's "vine-choked vats without bottom" (179). He is presumably a farmer, though he might be a mule-trader instead.

In "Dry September" one of the men in the barber shop who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes is a veteran. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin imagines these Europeans while lying on his cot in one of the few remaining pieces of American wilderness: "the frantic old-world peoples" who buy the cotton that is grown on the Delta, and use it for "shells to shoot at one another" (275, 337). Although at the time of the story the U.S. had not entered the war that became known as World War II , major fighting was underway between the Allies and the Axis armies.

In The Town this drummer is imagined by Jefferson observers to have oversold some commodity to Wallstreet Panic Snopes, thus making it necessary for him to borrow money.

In "Smoke" this "drummer" - a familiar term for traveling salesman when the story was written - supplies the drug store with the unpopular "city cigarettes" that will play such a major role in solving the crime (28).

Although never named, the drug store clerk in "Uncle Willy" plays a large role in the plot. He arrives in Jefferson "about six months" before Reverend Schultz and Mrs. Merridew hire him to manage the drugstore while Willy undergoes drug treatment in Memphis (232). No one in Jefferson "knows anything about him," but he arrives in town with "letters to the church," which is apparently the basis on which he is hired (232). He completely transforms the store - making it attractive to the "town trade" that had previously shunned it (233).

In Flags in the Dust the "youthful clerk" in the drug store who re-wraps the package that Joan dropped in the street also "stares at her boldly" (319).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard spots the corpse of this Union soldier in the river, hanging over the rump of his dead and floating horse after the bridge was blown up. Because he has a horse, he is either an officer or attached to a cavalry unit, but there is no way to tell which is more likely.

In The Town this court clerk reads the indictment at Mink's trial and asks him how he pleads - "'guilty or not guilty?'" (86).

In Sanctuary the clerk is mentioned calling Temple's name and when the judge upholds Horace's only objection during her testimony.

Sanctuary describes the various farmers and their wives who come into Jefferson on the weekend. Horace, for example, watches while three of these women get down from a wagon and "don various finery" on the street in front of his house. 'Country people' in this novel can be black or white: "the women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments," and the men "in slow overalls and khaki" who move in crowds through the town square and stand in throngs "listening" to the music playing on radios and phonographs in record and drug stores (111, 112).

In "The Tall Men" Mr. Pearson, who works for the federal government, lumps all country people together in the phrase "these people" (46). Pearson's work with various relief agencies has taught him to expect the worst from country people, and he assumes that they are all shiftless and untrustworthy. The encounter with the McCallum family and the story of their lives, as Gombault tells it, forces Pearson to revise his assumptions and abandon his prejudices.

"Three or four miles" outside the town that "The Hound" refers to only as "the countyseat" (162), the men in the Sheriff's car meet "wagons and cars . . . going home from market day in town" (163). The text does not actually mention any people in either kind of vehicle, but it does say that the "Sheriff greets them with a single gesture of his fat arm," and that "them" must be human (163), or at least potential voters.

This character in The Town waits in the car at the Jefferson cemetery to drive Linda Snopes to Memphis.

This "negro in overalls" is the second driver in The Sound and the Fury: he agrees to drive Jason from Mottson back to Jefferson for four dollars (313).

In The Town this "delivery boy from Christian's drugstore" regularly brings "his ritual tray of four coca colas" for bank employees at the end of the business day (323). The novel does not specify his race, but typically in the Yoknapatawpha fictions delivery boys are black.

In "A Rose for Emily," this "Negro delivery boy" brings Emily the package of arsenic she purchased from the druggist (126).