Character Keys

A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673).

"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner.

In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.)

In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

Among the people who come out to the hunting camp to watch the final hunt for the bear in Go Down, Moses are several men from beyond Yoknapatawpha, "townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson" (212). They come because they have heard of Lion and Old Ben, but are not hunters: "Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday" (212).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to him, brought about the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273).

Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.

The Beauchamp property in Go Down, Moses is a large cotton plantation, with an unspecified but clearly large number of slaves who work either in the house or in the fields. "Four or five" of these slaves appear in "Was" when they bring horses for the hunt for Tomey's Turl. During the Civil War most of them leave; according to the narrator, the "ones that didn't go" are the ones that their master, Hubert Beauchamp, "could not have wanted" (287).

Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men outside the South who, according to him, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery.

The people that Ike sees on the streets of Memphis in Go Down, Moses are well-dressed, "men in starched collars and neckties" and "in fine overcoats" (219), "and the ladies rosy in furs" (221).

This couple appears in "Pantaloon in Black" as a story and again as a chapter in Go Down, Moses only negatively: Rider "could not remember his parents at all" (130). He was raised by his aunt.

Ike's account of U.S. history in Go Down, Moses divides the North during the Civil War era into the capitalist class and the workers. That second group is who is represented by this entry: "the New England mechanics who didn't even own land," the factory workers who lived in "rented tenements," and so on (273).

As a widower, in "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin lives in a house in Jefferson with members of his dead wife's family. The short story identifies the woman in that "family" as his wife's niece and says nothing about the rest of them (274). The novel calls her Ike's "sister-in-law" at the beginning of the novel (6) and his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335), and identifies the rest of the "family" as her children.

In it clearly implied in Go Down, Moses that the labor on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is supplied by Negro tenant farmers. They don't appear in the novel, but when Lucas sees the sun coming up he thinks that in "another hour . . . every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it" (40). Like the fields, these mules belong to Roth Edmonds.

This young woman who lives in the Beauchamp big house after Emancipation in Go Down, Moses, with skin "even lighter in color than Tomey’s Terrel," is identified by Hubert Beauchamp as his cook (288); however, his sister Sophonsiba is almost certainly right to suspect that she is also his mistress. In response to Sophonsiba's accusation that this woman's presence "defiles" their home, Hubert exclaims "They’re folks too just like we are!" (288).

In Go Down, Moses the named men from town who come into the woods to be part of the hunt for Old Men are Bayard and John Sartoris and Jason Compson, but the group also includes these two unnamed men.

This "engine-driver" blows the whistle at two different points in Go Down, Moses: after stopping the train on its first run, to scare away the young bear investigating the tracks (303); and to let Ike know they are approaching the area of the hunting camp (306).

During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' account of it in Go Down, Moses, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277).

As part of the account in Go Down, Moses of Reconstruction in the South, these white men "armed in sheets and masks" who terrorize freed blacks are described (277). The details of the description suggests the Ku Klux Klan, especially "formalized regalia of hooded sheets" and "fiery christian symbols" (276), but this group is never given a label. And astonishingly, the narrator suggests that its original founders were the descendants of the carpetbaggers from the North, lynching "the race their ancestors had come to save" (276).

When Ike tells the younger hunters in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses about the old days "when I first started hunting in this bottom," he mentions that among the men who hunted with him was "Will Legate's" grandfather (328).

Roth Edmonds meets with these unnamed friends after church in "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses; their farm is eight miles from the Edmonds plantation.

In Go Down, Moses this "bank president," who tells Ike about the bank account in Ike's name that Cass Edmonds has been paying money into (295), is certainly not Bayard Sartoris, who is also a Jefferson bank president at the time of the novel. This "bank president" is never named, but although the text is not explicit, it seems likely that he is the father of the woman - also never named - whom Ike marries.

In both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses the signature of this "nameless clerk" appears on the marriage license for George Wilkins and Nat Beauchamp (221, 70).

The Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse in Go Down, Moses hears the divorce petition that Roth Edmonds has put forth for Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is described as “quite old” (123).

In the "Was" chapter of Go Down, Moses, this unnamed member of the group of slaves who are part of the hunt for Tomey’s Turl is the one who returns to the big house to fetch a fyce, whiskey, and a "piece of red ribbon that had been on Miss Sophonsiba's neck" that she sends to Buck (17).

The first time Ike refers to the Bible in Go Down, Moses, he talks about it as the word of God: "He told in the Book," etc. (243). But when Cass challenges him on the subject of race in the Bible, repeating the familiar pro-slavery argument that the enslaved Africans were the accursed "sons of Ham" (246), Ike introduces the idea of "the men who wrote His Book for Him" (246), i.e. the human authors who "transcribed His Words," and often misquoted Him, or misrepresented His will, despite their desire to "write down the heart's truth" (247).

Judge Gowan's assistant in Go Down, Moses is described as a “young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses” (70).

These "hunters" are created by the narrator at the start of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, when he defines "hunters" as a exalted category of its own, a quasi-spiritual group, men who are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181). Distinguished also from "women," "boys," and "children," hunters tell stories about hunting while drinking liquor "in salute to" their prey (181-82). Even the camp cooks, however, are "hunters first and cooks afterward" (185).

Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).

In Go Down, Moses Semmes is a distiller in Memphis to whom Boon and Ike are sent by Major de Spain for whisky during the annual hunting trip.

Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).

Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).

General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom Cass Edmonds mentions in Go Down, Moses as part of his argument with Ike McCaslin about God's role in Southern history (271), was a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and as Cass notes, "on Cemetery Ridge" at Gettysburg (272).

In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin" inherited and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849.

In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278).

Thinking about his legacy in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to "the ones who sired the Beauchamp who sired Uncle Hubert and his Uncle Hubert's sister" (294). The locution is confusing, in part because "his Uncle Hubert's sister" is in fact Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, as one might expect him to acknowledge. And obviously "the ones who sired" doesn't imply two fathers, but a longer generation of 'sires,' who would include Ike's great-grandfather and earlier male ancestors.

When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the only reference to Thisbe in Go Down, Moses, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household.

In "The Bear" the narrative notes that "in April" school is always let out "so that the sons of farmers could help with the land's planting" (291).

Both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses briefly describe the process by which generations of planters created the plantation agriculture of the Delta. Before the Civil War it was these "gangs of slaves" who provided the labor force which turned the wilderness into cotton fields (270, 323).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin has vividly creates an image the diverse group of human beings that he thinks of as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down (279, 346). It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed" together (279, 346).

The character of the unnamed woman with whom Don Boyd has had an affair and a child in "Delta Autumn" comes into focus slowly. At the start of the story she is referred to elliptically as the "doe" whom Boyd hunted the year before (268). When she appears before Ike in person at the end of the story, she brings with her "something intangible" (277). She is wearing a man's hat and rain coat, and has "a face young" with "dark eyes" (268). She tells Ike she is a teacher.

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses note that after slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270, 323-24).

All we know about the father of the young woman who has given birth to Don Boyd's child in "Delta Autumn" is that he lived in Indianapolis and died "two years ago" (278). (When Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses he made the young woman's family part of the extended McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, and so although he made no changes in the way this father is described, radically re-positioned him in the larger Yoknapatawpha narrative; for that reason we have a separate entry for him in the database.)

"Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses describe the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians who lived there until the 19th century (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it. (See also the entry for Unnamed First Aboriginal in the index.)

"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames. In "Delta Autumn," Don Boyd uses them to suggest how widespread are the contemporary political threats to the U.S. (269). In the revised version of the story that appears in Go Down, Moses, the character who mentions them is Roth Edmonds (322).

Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.

In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90).