Character Keys

In both the 1940 magazine version of "The Old People" and the revised version of it that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, the step-father of Had-Two-Fathers is "one of the slaves which [Doom] inherited" from Moketubbe (the story, 203). After impregnating a slave woman from New Orleans, Doom "pronounces a marriage" between her and "one of the slave men he has just inherited" upon becoming "The Man" (the novel, 158). But this man's place on the family tree is ambiguous.

Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving, neither the chief of the tribe (The Man) nor his son are named. In the patriarchal society Faulkner imagines, this son is heir to the title The Man - and as the son of The Man's sister, his cousin Doom is out of the line of succession. In "Red Leaves" both The Man and his son die mysteriously after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans. In "A Justice" Doom's responsibility for their deaths is made explicit.

Ad - Admiral Dewey Snopes - is one of Eck Snopes' children. He was named after a hero of the Spanish-American War.

Wallstreet Panic Snopes - given his absurd name absurdly, in the hopes that it might mean he'll get rich, but more often called "Wall" in the fictions - is a very young "little periwinkle-eyed boy" when he first appears in The Hamlet (304). He appears in all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy, and his eyes are still "an incredible tender youthful periwinkle blue" at the end of The Mansion (461).

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218).

When Byron Snopes's four children step off the train in Jefferson, Chick describes the youngest as "a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man's shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent" (378). He never indicates the sex of this child, perhaps because he cannot determine it himself - or perhaps to emphasize the strangeness of the four as a group. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

This "Jicarilla squaw" from "Old Mexico" is the mother of "Byron Snopes's children" (379), the four sinister kids who appear at the end of The Town and then, as soon as Yoknapatawpha realizes how dangerous they are, are sent back into the west. She is mentioned, barely, in The Mansion, but nothing more can be said about her.

Vardaman (and his twin brother Bilbo) are minor figures in The Town and The Hamlet, one of the three (or four, in the second novel) sons of I.O. Snopes and his second wife. Also like Bilbo, he is named for one of the segregationist politicians in modern Mississippi politics, in his case for James K. Vardaman, a very outspoken white supremacist who served as both a Governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.

On the Snopes family tree, Clarence - according to The Mansion, it's "pronounced 'Cla'nce'" (325) - is the son of I.O. and the half-brother of Montgomery Ward Snopes. He is one of the four Snopes named in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, but appears only as the boy whose "hulking but catlike presence" makes Bryon Snopes nervous (235). It is in Sanctuary that his character as one of the most venal Snopeses emerges.

As a child, a hulking and "bear-shaped" figure, Saint Elmo eats all of the candy in Varner's case (350). A son of I.O. Snopes from his first marriage, he appears only in The Hamlet. (The names of the various Snopeses come from a variety of sources; Saint Elmo's name comes from the title of an 1866 novel by Georgia author Augusta Jane Evans.)

In The Hamlet I.O. Snopes calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that she is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a twice-married man, i.e. a bigamist.

Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43).

Although through most of the 1930s and 1940s Gavin Stevens looks like a confirmed bachelor, in four late fictions Faulkner decided to add love and marriage to his biography. The woman he marries was born Melisandre Backus, the descendant of the Melisandre who married a Backus in the middle of the Civil War ("My Grandmother Millard") and more immediately the only child of a Yoknapatawpha plantation owner. By the time she marries Gavin, she is the widow of a New Orleans gangster and the mother of two children.

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).

There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.

The mother of Gavin and Maggie - Mrs. Lemuel Stevens, nee Maggie Dandridge - doesn't appear in person in the fictions, but various items associated with her do. In Intruder in the Dust the hat Eunice Habersham wears reminds her grandson Chick Mallison of her; it's a "round faintly dusty-looked black hat set squarely on the top of her head" (73); on both women, this looks "exactly right" (127). In "Knight's Gambit" Chick thinks of the books in his family's house as "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149).

Although he is mentioned in three short stories and actually appears in three novels, the father of Charles Mallison, Jr., remains an elusive character. He is dead in the first story that mentions him ("An Error in Chemistry") and almost irrelevant even in the texts where he appears: Intruder in the Dust, The Town and The Mansion. His wife, Maggie Stevens by birth and Gavin's twin sister, sometimes calls him Charley, and according to The Town he owns the livery stable in Jefferson (at a time when cars are displacing horses).

Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.

We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.

Gowan Stevens' mother never appears in person, but three Yoknapatawpha fictions mention her. If we re-arrange their order of publication as the sequence of events in her biography, her youngest mention occurs in The Town, where she accompanies her husband for the duration of his State Department assignment to "some far place" - which explains why she sends her son Gowan from Washington to Jefferson (3).

In The Reivers "Grandfather's mother" is mentioned twice: when Lucius Priest assumes that she taught her son to "make his manners" to a lady in the same way that the males in the family always do (200); and when Lucius notes that his Grandfather, "an only child," stayed with his mother in Carolina while his father was away fighting during the Civil War (285). She died in 1864.

In The Reivers Delphine is the cook in Grandfather Priest's house and the fourth and current wife of Ned McCaslin (31).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that name in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's unnamed mother was the oldest daughter of Lucas and Mollie Beauchamp; she dies while giving birth to him. In "A Point of Law," Lucas and Molly Beauchamp have at least one child besides Nat; we are assuming this child is the daughter who gives birth to Samuel, though the story's only reference to her is ambiguous. According to the narrator, it is known that Lucas has "one daughter with grandchildren" (214).

Buddy McCallum's dead wife in "The Tall Men" - the mother of the twins Lucius and Anse - is only mentioned briefly, in connection with her absence from the McCallum family graveyard where the story ends. Like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, she "wanted to be buried with her folks" (60). According to Gombault, "she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

In "There Was a Queen," Elnora refers to Miss Jenny's "paw" as having been killed by the Yankees during the Civil War (732). She doesn't say any more about him, and he is not even mentioned in any other texts, but the larger story of the Sartoris family as Faulkner tells it elsewhere, especially in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished, suggests that this man owned a slave plantation in one of the Carolinas - and that the family's "Cal-lina house" was a mansion before the Yankees burned it down (732).

In The Mansion Mink Snopes's mother died before he got to know her - or even what she called him.

This is the younger of Mink and Yetti's two "towheaded" daughters who are briefly mentioned in The Hamlet (81) and The Mansion. They are two years apart in age, but the first novel does not distinguish between them. The second does: unlike the older sister, this "younger daughter" becomes "the madam" of a Memphis whorehouse (320) - though that detail is mentioned only when the narrative notes that Mink unknowingly walks past the place on his way to buy a pistol.

Mink Snopes' wife - given a first name, Yettie, in The Mansion, the second and last fiction in which she appears - plays a small part in the large saga of the Yoknapatawpha Snopeses, but has a very powerful backstory, as it's described in The Hamlet. Mink met during his travels, when after seeing her "standing in the savage lamp-light . . . in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp" (243-44), he called a halt to his travels and took a job at the camp. Her mother died in giving birth to her.

Whether as Hoake (as his name is spelled in The Hamlet) or Hoke (as it's spelled in The Town and The Mansion), McCarron plays a biologically crucial role in the Snopes trilogy as the father of Linda Snopes, daughter of Eula and, ostensibly, Flem. His character is not attractive - except to Eula - in the first novel. He is an outsider to Yoknapatawpha, the son of substantial property owners, "a little swaggering and definitely spoiled though not vain so much as intolerant" (150).

Mrs. Will Varner, Maggie Varner in The Hamlet, figures in four of the fictions (compared to her husband's ten). She is mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the unnamed wife of "Uncle Billy," as Will is called there, specifically in connection with the birth of her first child, Jody. The next time she is appears, in The Hamlet, she is the mother of sixteen children, eleven of whom still live, though only two of them are important in the novel: Jody and his sister Eula.

Appearing only in The Hamlet, Isaac "Ike" Snopes is the cognitively limited cousin of Flem and Mink. At 14, he is a "hulking figure" in "bursting overalls" (94) who works around Mrs. Littlejohn's hotel as a kind of janitor. Ike is referred to as an "idiot" and "creature" with a "mowing and bobbing head" and a "Gorgon-face" that "had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair" (95). Officially, Flem is Ike's guardian, but he does nothing to protect Ike from being exploited by Lump Snopes.

Ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes is the focal character in "Barn Burning." The youngest of sharecropper Abner Snopes' four children, he is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud" (4).

While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt.

Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.

In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.

Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives).

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.

The end of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family line in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making their child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter.

The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).

Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.

The most vivid detail that Lucius Priest, the narrator of The Reivers, provides about his mother, Alison, is her love for riding in her father-in-law's automobile: she sits in the back seat with her children, her "face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's" (41). She is resourceful enough to "invent a kind of shield" to keep them all safe whenever Grandfather discharges the tobacco he chews (41).

In "Go Down, Moses," and again in the chapter with that title in the novel Go Down, Moses - the only texts he appears in - Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (256, 351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.

Like William Faulkner's father Murry in real life, Lucius' father Maury Priest owns a livery stable. In the first chapter of The Reivers, Maury displays considerable force of character when he handles the trouble caused by Boon's rash anger. And the "gentlemanly" way he treats even his black employees is worth noting (8). But after that he becomes almost invisible, even before departing with the rest of the adults in the family for Bay St. Louis.

Like Lucas Beauchamp, George Wilkins is a tenant farmer on the Edmonds plantation who is at times Lucas' rival and at others his assistant; he is also Lucas' son-in-law, though the time at which that happens is hard to pin down. He appears first in "A Point of Law," as competition for Lucas' moonshine business; Lucas' attempt to foil him lands them both in essentially comic trouble with the law. Their get-out-of-jail card is the (possibly forged) certificate of marriage between him and Lucas' daughter Nat.

Henry Beauchamp is the oldest child of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses. He is raised alongside Roth Edmonds as the white child's "black foster-brother" (106), just as his father was raised alongside Roth’s father, Zack. When Roth, however, insists on drawing the color line between them, the seven-year-old Henry accepts the new terms of their relationship, but tells Roth, "peacefully," that "I aint shamed of nobody . . . Not even me" (110).

In The Reivers, his last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).