Character Keys

In the last act of Requiem for a Nun Nancy tells Temple and Gavin that "any of them" might have been the father of the child she lost (219). "Them" refers to the various men she has had sex with, as both a woman and a prostitute.

In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112).

The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184).

The representation of modernity in Requiem for a Nun includes "the boom and ululance of radio," represented by the voices that are heard on it: "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists" (192).

In Requiem for a Nun this 20th-century "planter" is a generic figure whose fate suggests the kinds of changes that have occurred in Yoknapatawpha: where once he had slaves and then tenants to work his fields, after his "son" is drafted in the second World War it is the planter himself who does that, riding "on the seat of his tractor" (193).

According to the history of Jefferson provided by Requiem for a Nun, soon after the first whites arrive in Yoknapatawpha come these "new" settlers: "new names and faces too in the settlement now - faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible antecedents other than mammalinity nor past other than the simple years which had scored them" (12).

There are only a few references in Requiem for a Nun to the black population of Jefferson. The narrative qualifies its representation of progress ("there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town") by noting an exception - "except the cabins of Negroes" (189). It is also clearly implied in a later passage that those cabins lacked screens to keep the bugs out (190).

Although Requiem for a Nun refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the U.S. until the 1930s.)

One of the more exotic characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this "Mohammedan" prince has a "European mistress" in Requiem for a Nun; he never appears in the novel, but is mentioned as the man who built the "hideway" in the south of France where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens take their honeymoon (122).

Requiem for a Nun lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising.

In Requiem for a Nun the "masons who erect" the Confederate statue in Courthouse Square are mentioned, but not described (189). They should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the secret society who are mentioned in The Town.

In Requiem for a Nun the German tank gun that serves as Jefferson's monument to the men who served in World War II was captured "by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms," the sons of interned Japanese Americans (194). (Over 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, many in the 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.)

In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190).

Out of towners who stay at "the hotel" in Jefferson are categorized in Requiem for a Nun as "drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses" (189). "Drummers" are traveling salesmen.

According to the account of Yoknapatawpha's history in Requiem for a Nun, the first slaves were brought into the county by Louis Grenier. This enslaved "coachman" is one of the two Grenier slaves who appear in the narrative when Grenier drives his "imported carriage" into Jefferson to see the construction of the new courthouse.

This "grandmother" appears in Requiem for a Nun only to explain how Cecilia Farmer inscribes her own name and the date on a pane of glass in the jail: she uses her grandmother's diamond ring (182).

Like another of the earliest settlers in Jefferson mentioned in Requiem for a Nun, this man is "German" and a "blacksmith" (183), but they are very different figures. This man is one of the "carpetbaggers" who come to Jefferson at the end of the Civil War, a deserter from the Union Army who arrives "riding a mule" and, according to the tales that were later told about him, bringing with him "for saddle-blanket sheaf on sheaf of virgin and uncut United States banknotes" - no doubt nefariously obtained (183).

According to the history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, "the Frenchman" alternated with "the Spaniard" for possession and control of the area (81). Historically, this land was claimed and ruled over by France several different times during the 18th century.

The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun treats the "Federal provost-marshals" who came to the defeated South charged with protecting the rights of the slaves who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War according to the then-popular pro-Southern accounts of Reconstruction: the elections they preside over are described as corrupted by carpetbaggers (87).

In Requiem for a Nun this man attends Mohataha and the Chickasaws' removal from Yoknapatawpha along with the "Federal land agent" (170).

In Requiem for a Nun these "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194). Calling out-of-state students "exchange students" is an odd formulation, suggesting that 'the North' they come from is essentially a different country - as of course it would have been to the Confederates who originally carried those flags during the Civil War.

In Requiem for a Nun this "female slave child" sits next to Mohataha in her wagon, holding "the crusted slippers" that originally came from France (170).

In its account of modern changes in Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun focuses on the generational experience of the "son" of the large plantation, who goes to World War II from "the seat of the tractor" with which he, rather than his father's tenants, works the land; upon his return he leaves behind "the long monotonous endless unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields" to live with his wife and growing family "in automobile trailers of G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges" (193).

In Requiem for a Nun a "mustering officer" from Richmond presides over the swearing in ceremony of the Confederate regiment that Sartoris organizes in Yoknapatawpha (36).

In Requiem for a Nun, these are the eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. It seems likely that at least some of them, like the canoes they traveled in, are Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada.

The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).

In Requiem for a Nun this man owns a "small hill farm" in Alabama (185); he is the father of the unnamed Confederate "lieutenant" who marries Cecilia Farmer (182).

A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, Patton became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed.

Louis LeFleur was a French Canadian voyageur, or explorer. The "trading-post store" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun on the bluffs above the Pearl River became the seed for the city of Jackson (84). He married a local Choctaw, the daughter of a chief, and had a son named Greenwood Le Flore, who also appears in the novel's cast of characters.

Benjamin Humphreys (Faulkner misspells his name in Requiem for a Nun) was a Southern officer during the Civil War who turned to politics during Reconstruction. In October, 1865, he was elected Governor of Mississippi as a Democrat. As an unpardoned Confederate he was ineligible to serve by the terms of surrender, so he had himself inaugurated and sworn in. In June, 1868, Federal troops were used forcibly to remove him from office. He was a strong advocate of Jim Crow laws as a way to deny freed slaves their rights as citizens.

Ernest Hemingway was the American writer whom Faulkner considered his rival for most of his career, though the two men had a cordial long distance relationship and Faulkner often alluded to or quoted from Hemingway in public statements. In Requiem for a Nun Temple alludes to Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to explain that a woman who has been sexually assaulted could be in denial that it had happened to her: "it had never actually happened to a g-- woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged" (121).

Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.

At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.

Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)

Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 (referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi.

The "Burnside" who makes the list of men who heard the "hackle-lifting" rebel yell in Requiem for a Nun had command of the Union Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, these "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200, 4). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204, 9).

According to Uncle Gavin in "A Name for the City," this child provides useful and necessary assistance to the magnificent Greek poet, Homer.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts.

During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail.

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)

In "Knight's Gambit" the tutors employed to educate the Harriss children at home are described, with some irony, as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145).

"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163).

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).

The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Although he is something of a private detective himself, Gavin Stevens hires this private detective to surveil Max Harriss in Memphis; as he puts it, "A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it" (201).