Primary Key (Int Vs Char)

I seem to recall many debates and articles about primary keys, but for the life of me, I can't seem to figure out what to do in what is probably be a very straight forward situation (below). Must be all the late nights lately impairing my common sense.

So, I've basically got a set of data where I want to extract a status field from the table design. I'll end up with two tables:

MainTable(Field1,Field2, ... ,FieldA ,StatusID)
StatusTable(StatusID,Field1,Field2) [shouldn't be that big a table, actually]

It's a silly thing but... are there any significant reasons why I should choose int for my StatusID instead of char?

I seem to be under the impression that using arbitrary int numbers as the identifiers will yield better performance on joins; but from past experience, using arbitrary int numbers can be a bother to interpret the data. :P I've seen tables where they were so full of numeric codes, that I had to do multiple joins to the respective code tables to yield what each code meant (or what that particular row meant as a whole).

Of course, I don't mean to use an actual full description for my primary keys, but would it be so bad to use something like "N" (to indicate "normal")?