Character Keys

This man is a "neighbor" of Mrs. Harriss in "Knight's Gambit"; because he passes her property "on his way home," he can provide the people in Jefferson with information about Gualdres' odd behavior at nights (178).

The nursemaid who takes care of Mrs. Harriss' son Max in "Knight's Gambit" is "a light-colored Negress a good deal smarter, or at least snappier-looking than any other woman white or black either in Jefferson" (158). The Mansion also refers to this character as "the nurse," but does not otherwise describe her (217).

In "Knight's Gambit" the animals on the Harris plantation are very well attended to. There are not only "grooms" for the horses (234), but also "special human beings to wait on" the dogs (165).

The white man who rents the Harriss plantation in "Knight's Gambit" decides after a year to bring "his own Negro farm-hands" from Memphis to work the land (160). It seems as if they are wage laborers (who are paid by the day or month) rather than sharecroppers or tenant farmers (who are paid by a share of the crop they raise), but that is not made explicit.

When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he has a kind of prevision of the local young men who will soon be killed in the fighting, and the grief of "those who had created" them, without realizing that the day would come when their child "might die in agony" in a foreign place they "had never even heard of before" and didn't even know how to pronounce (251).

The description in "Knight's Gambit" of the people who watch the polo matches at the Harriss plantation includes (separate from the "farmers" and "the tenants and renters and croppers") a group it calls "the landholders" (163). This presumably refers to the owners of the farm land that is worked by the tenants, renters and sharecroppers, though Faulkner usually refers to them as landlords or land owners - or "planters," the word he uses elsewhere in the story: "the bottomland planters” (251).

This "inspector-general" in "Knight's Gambit" is apparently part of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which was officially organized in 1915 to train male college students in military tactics and discipline (205). He certifies the high quality of the R.O.T.C. program that Charles Mallison participates in as a student at the Academy in Jefferson. R.O.T.C. programs are usually based in colleges and universities, but according to Charles, "although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C.

When Charles Mallison explains Gualdres' reason for enlisting in the fight against Nazi Germany in "Knight's Gambit," he includes among the possible reasons the fact that the Germans "were rendering a whole race into fertilizer and lubricating oil" - an odd and perhaps callous way to refer to the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe (255). (Gualdres' actual reason, according to Charles, is that the Germans "had abolished horses from civilized cavalry," 255).

These are the "five or six girls" in "Knight's Gambit" who "attended the female half of the Academy" with Mrs. Harriss and "who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152). These girlhood friends are the women who would receive seasonal cards from Mrs. Harriss "postmarked from Rome or London or Paris or Vienna or Cairo" (166). Maggie Mallison is one of these women, but none of the others are named.

In "Knight's Gambit," this "caretaker" at the Harriss estate is "not the old one, the first renter" - a man from Memphis who manages the farming part of the estate - but "a fat Italian or Greek" from New Orleans, "who lives in the house all the time," even when it is otherwise empty (162). Harriss calls him "his butler"; when guests arrive he waits on them wearing "a four-in-hand tie of soft scarlet silk" and carrying "a pistol loose in his hip pocket" (162).

In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison thinks of "the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command" against the German air campaign during the Battle of Britain in 1940 (205). The valor of these R.A.F. pilots was widely celebrated during and after World War II.

The "first American Expeditionary Force" that Gavin Stevens refers to in "Knight's Gambit" are the more than one million U.S. troops who landed in France in 1917 and 1918 to join England and France in the fight against the Germany (256).

The woman in Go Down, Moses whom Lucas calls a "yellow slut" - that is, she is light-skinned and promiscuous - was (perhaps unofficially) married to and (certainly unofficially) divorced from Oscar, one of the workers on the McCaslin plantation; she came to Jefferson from Memphis, and returned there after Roth Edmonds "voced" them, as Lucas puts it (115).

Over 3000 U.S. servicemen were killed or wounded during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but this entry reflects the unusual way that Charles Mallison recalls December 7th, 1941, in "Knight's Gambit" - "a Jap dropped a bomb on another American" (254).

The term "butler" in this instance from "Knight's Gambit" is a euphemism, used somewhat facetiously to describe the subordinate gangsters who take part in the funeral services for Mr. Harriss: "eight or ten of the butlers in their sharp clothes and arm-pitted pistols brought him home to lie in state" (168).

In "Knight's Gambit" Paoli is the "famous Italian fencing-master" who taught Max Harriss (169). According to Harriss' unnamed sister, Max was "the best pupil Paoli had had in years" (190).

In "Knight's Gambit" Robert Markey is "a lawyer" and a man in Memphis "city politics . . . who had been at Heidelberg" with Gavin Stevens and now lives in the city (201). Gavin contacts him for assistance in keeping track of Max Harriss when he goes to Memphis.

In "Knight's Gambit" Hampton Killegrew is "the night marshal" of Jefferson (213).

Joe Ginotta is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of the First World War: according to Gavin, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey" (243).

Joseph Conrad is a British writer best known for works such as The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. He makes an appearance in "Knight's Gambit" when Gavin describes the Parisian street where he once visited Mrs. Harriss as the kind of street one can visit "simply by opening the right page in Conrad" (256).

In "Knight's Gambit" Miss Cayley is the "farmer's daughter" who is engaged to Max Harriss, and also one of Sebastian Gualdres’ dalliances (191). She is "about the same age as the Harriss girl [that is, about 20 years old] but not quite as tall, slender yet solid too, as country-bred girls can look, with dark hair and black eyes" (192–93).

This is the group that the narrator of Intruder in the Dust refers to (twice) as "the young men and some not so young" (27, 39) who "work hard all week [hanging around] in the poolhall" (39). They are also identified with the barber shop, and on ordinary evenings after the movie ends at least some of them can be found "drinking coca cola and playing nickels into the drugstore jukebox" (208). Some of them "have some vague connection with cotton or automobiles or land- and stock-sales"; all of them bet on "prize fights and punchboards and national ballgames" (39).

In Intruder in the Dust these "four or five men" take Jake Montgomery's body from the truck that brings it into town and through the back door into the funeral parlor (178).

The "Tennessee police" who close Jake Montgomery's roadhouse and "run him back across the Mississippi line" in Intruder in the Dust are presumably state police officers (113).

In the last chapter of Intruder in the Dust we learn that "for weeks" after the story ends, these "strangers" would ask the people of Yoknapatawpha how a man in jail could get hold of a gun to shoot himself with (232). Apparently they don't have any other questions about what has happened in the novel.

In Intruder in the Dust this superintendent of the schools in Jefferson calls Gavin Stevens to ask whether to have school on Monday.

In Intruder in the Dust the crew who work in the sawmill where trees from Sudley Workitt's land are turned into lumber are "hired by the day" (219). They are almost certainly not the same men as the "three youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" (18). The two sawmills are close enough in space, but not in time: that earlier group appears three years before the Gowrie's begin harvesting Workitt's timber.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick's mother exchanged friendship rings with this "room-mate" when they were in college together "at Sweetbriar Virginia" (68). The woman lives in California now, and her daughter goes to Sweetbriar.

In Intruder in the Dust the crowd of spectators at the football game in the Mottstown high school stadium is divided between the people who "sit in the grandstand" and "the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play" (122).

In Intruder in the Dust the "overseer" at the Mallison farm helps Mrs. Mallison look for her missing ring (70).

According to Intruder in the Dust, on a typical evening one would see "Negro girls and women" outside the window of the jail, talking with the black men who are confined inside it (38). Even though the exceptional circumstances of the story have kept them away and in hiding, the narrator describes them as "the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses" (50).

When Sheriff Hampton goes out to investigate Vinson Gowrie's grave in Intruder in the Dust, he takes along two Negro prisoners from the jail to do the digging. Both are dressed in "blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore" (136; in this context "street gangs" are chain gangs or convict work gangs). The narrative makes no effort to distinguish these "two Negroes," as they are repeatedly called (154, 156, 157, etc.). Both are equally anxious about their task, especially when Vinson's father appears.

Like the other Negroes in Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha during the events of Intruder in the Dust, the bootblack" (30) who works in the barbershop makes himself invisible on Sunday morning, even though that is "the bootblack's best day shining shoes and brushing clothes" (39).

In Intruder in the Dust this "mother" is mentioned only as one possible reason why a starting player on the Jefferson high school football team won't play in the game against Mottstown (121).

The hypothetical "expert that can tell about bullets" (71) whom Chick imagines in Intruder in the Dust; "somebody from the Memphis police" (188) that Chick assumes Sheriff Hampton will have to call in. Though in a different state, Memphis is the closest large city to Yoknapatawpha.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick's fantasy of Miss Habersham's long drive through the counties around Yoknapatawpha climaxes when, along a lonely country road, she is confronted by "a man in his nightshirt and unlaced shoes, carrying a lantern," who asks her where she's trying to go (185).

This is "the third" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).

This is one of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust. This first man is vividly described with "his brown farmer's hands" and "his brown weathered face," "curious divinant and abashless" (137).

The real name of the writer whom Gavin Stevens calls "a sound sensitive lady poet of the time of my youth" (191) in Intruder in the Dust is Djuna Barnes, well known in the years after World War I as part of the Modernist movement in the arts. Today she is best known as the author of the lesbian novel Nightwood (1936), but she was also a visual artist, a journalist and, as Gavin's description says, a poet. The lines he quotes are taken, with a line omitted, from Barnes' poem "To the Dead Favourite of Liu Ch'e" (1920).

The Mallisons hire men at two different points in Intruder in the Dust to drive Mrs. Mallison. This one drives her to Mottstown to watch her son play football.

The gun with which Vinson Gowrie was shot in Intruder in the Dust was "an automatic pistol" taken from a German officer captured by Buddy McCallum during World War I (161).

Referred to as "another lady" in Intruder in the Dust this woman angers another woman in Frenchman's Bend, apparently by winning a baking competition (227). Her husband is locally well-known and -patronized as a maker of moonshine whiskey. The narrative's use of "lady" is clearly sarcastic.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick gets to play in a varsity football game in Mottstown when this "regular player" cannot (121). He may not be able to play due to injury, or academic ineligibility, or an over-protective mother - the narrator offers all three possibilities.

According to Sheriff Hampton in Intruder in the Dust, Jake Montgomery's "pa" owns a "farm over beyond Glasgow" (113).

Intruder in the Dust mentions this young woman who, as both Chick's mother and her own once did, attends college at Sweetbriar, in Virginia.

In Intruder in the Dust the person who intends to buy the lumber that the Gowries are harvesting - "the lumber's ultimate consignee," as Gavin Stevens puts it (223) - lives in Memphis.

In Intruder in the Dust the hills in the Beat Four section of the county remind Chick Mallison that his ancestors came to Yoknapatawpha from Scotland by way of Carolina. If Chick is thinking specifically of his maternal ancestors, these people would belong on the Stevens family tree. But he could instead (or also) be thinking of his Mallison ancestors.

The "Wilcox" that Gavin refers to in Intruder in the Dust is General Cadmus Wilcox, commander of a Confederate brigade that took part in Pickett's Charge during the battle of Gettysburg (190).

Yoknapatawpha constables are stationed in each of the county's five Beats. They are paid "a dollar a prisoner every time [they] deliver a subpoena or serve a warrant" (62). Skipworth, the sheriff's constable who lives in and represents the law in Beat Four in Intruder in the Dust, is described as "a little driedup wizened stonedeaf old man not much larger than a boy" (37), but he is brave enough to take Lucas into custody to protect the black man from the anger of a white crowd, and to keep him locked in his house overnight until the Sheriff can get there.