Character Keys

There are a few references to Quentin's great-grandfather in the early fictions about the family. In The Sound and The Fury Mr. Compson mentions him when he gives Quentin his grandfather's watch (76). In "A Justice" Sam Fathers tells Quentin the "your great-grandpappy" bought him and his mother as slaves (344).

According to the early genealogy that Faulkner's 1946 "Appendix" creates for the Compson family, Charles Stuart Compson is the first member to be born in the new world. Named after Charles Stuart the Young Pretender, for whom his father fought in Scotland, Charles Stuart Compson served under the British commander Banastre Tarleton in the American Revolutionary War; Charles Stuart was thus part of the military serving the monarchy his father had formerly opposed.

In Flags in the Dust Caspey is the son of Simon Strother and the brother of Elnora. He is also one of the five men in the novel who are returning from France after the end of World War I. Caspey served in a non-combatant role with the U.S. Army over there; when he returned home to Jefferson, he brought with him some wildly exaggerated tales about his military service, and a set of new ideas about racial equality which made his family very nervous and drove Old Bayard to knock him down with a stick of stove wood.

Isom is Elnora's only child in Flags in the Dust, "a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound" (20). He is responsible for a number of chores around the Sartoris household, but most enjoys wearing Caspey's military uniform and taking the wheel of Bayard's car. There is no hint of how, if at all, he is being educated. He is at the wheel of a car again ten years later in Sanctuary, where he is "the negro driver" who works for Narcissa Sartoris (110) - and the only member of the Strother family who is included in the novel.

This Joby is Elnora's son and the (presumably) older brother of Isom and Saddie. The only information we have about him is that he has "gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street" (727). He plays no role in the plot of the story. (There is another Joby in the Strother family - during the Civil War he is a slave and afterwards a servant of the Sartorises - but he is the great-grandfather of this Joby. This Joby only appears in "There Was a Queen.")

Euphrony is briefly mentioned in Flags in the Dust as Simon's dead wife, which presumably also makes her the mother of Elnora and Caspey (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it seems to follow that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel makes no attempt to explore that issue. On the other hand, in "There Was a Queen" Elnora's mother is not named, but her (white) father is identified as Colonel John Sartoris. Again, however, no more is said about that.

Loosh - or Lucius, as he's called in "My Grandmother Millard" and, presumably, as he was actually named - appears or is mentioned in four of the Unvanquished stories as well as "My Grandmother." Biologically, he is the son of Joby and Louvinia, the husband of Philadelphy, and the uncle of Ringo. Thematically, he is the only slave on the Sartoris plantation (and one of the few in the Yoknapatawpha fictions) who openly rebels against his enslavement.

Born into slavery, Louvinia appears in two novels and seven stories as the cook at the Sartoris plantation and, along with her husband Joby, the head of the enslaved family that serves the Sartorises over many generations. When we first meet her, in the story Will Falls tells in Flags in the Dust about the day the Yankees arrived at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, Louvinia is "shellin' a bowl of peas fer supper" (20); she helps her master escape out the back door.

In the larger narrative of Yoknapatawpha Horace Benbow's place is a curious one. One of the two central characters in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Horace becomes the first major recurring character in the canon when Faulkner casts him as the protagonist of Sanctuary. After that second appearance he essentially disappears.

Julia Benbow, the wife of Will Benbow, and mother of Horace and Narcissa, is mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. According to the first novel, she died when Narcissa was seven years old. Narcissa remembers her as "a gentle figure . . . like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread" (172). She is not named in the second novel, and appears only in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" in conversations with Horace (184).

In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation.

As a family the Benbows are one of the oldest and most prominent in Jefferson, but the fictions don't provide much detail about the first several generations in town. "Judge Benbow" is mentioned in three fictions from the middle of Faulkner's career. In Absalom! he is mentioned twice: first as a paragon of genteel manners (35), and later as the unofficial executor of the (non-existent) "Estate of Goodhue Coldfield" who chivalrously takes care of Rosa over the years (172); he also has a son named Percy.

In Flags in the Dust, Caroline White is the Memphis girl who met and married (Young) Bayard Sartoris when he was teaching flying lessons in that city. She is identified mainly by her "wild bronze swirling" hair (45), but she is also recognizably a modern woman: she has no proper ideas about "keeping house," at least according to Jenny (51), and the narrator refers to "the brittle daring of her speech and actions" (73). She and her newborn son died, perhaps of influenza, in 1918, while her husband was fighting overseas in World War I.

Old Bayard's wife, the grandmother of Young Bayard and Young John Sartoris, is never named, and mentioned only in passing in Flags in the Dust, when that novel sums up the history of the parlor in the Sartoris mansion over the decades. We're told that she and her daughter-in-law and Miss Jenny clean the room "thoroughly" twice a year. There are exactly two words devoted to her: "his wife" (55).

The husband of Virginia Sartoris (Aunt Jenny) is a man named Du Pre. According to The Unvanquished, one of the two fictions in which he is mentioned, he was "killed at the very beginning of the War, by a shell from a Federal frigate at Fort Moultrie" (235). Fort Moultrie was one of the forts in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, and it's very likely that Du Pre, like the Sartorises, was from "Cal-lina" - as Elnora calls it in "There Was a Queen," the other text in which Jenny's husband is mentioned (732).

First mentioned but not named by Will Falls in Flags in the Dust when he mentions that Bayard's two sisters went to stay with his "gran'pappy" in Memphis during the Civil War (20), he comes into a little more focus in "My Grandmother Millard" when Bayard notes that his grandmother's dead husband owned a "supply house" in Memphis (688). One of his customers was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who (although the story never mentions it) was a well-known Memphis planter and slave-dealer at that time.

Rosa Millard - "Granny" to two boys, one white and one black - is one of Faulkner's most formidable old women. As John Sartoris' mother-in-law, she runs his plantation while he's away fighting in the Civil War.

Like their mother, John Sartoris' two daughters are almost invisible members of the family. This is the older of the pair, Bayard's older sister. She is twenty-two when Jenny Du Pre arrives in Mississippi in 1869; beyond that she is not named or described. From one of Will Falls' stories in Flags in the Dust we learn that she and her younger sister were sent to Memphis during the Civil War; the narrator tells us later that she is planning to marry in June, 1870.

Like John Sartoris, Dennison Hawk was a large plantation- and slave-owner who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War; he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. He never appears directly in the fictions, but is mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. His Alabama plantation, Hawkhurst, was burned by the Yankees sometime after his death. He is the husband of Louisa, who is Granny's sister, and hence he is Bayard's uncle as well as Drusilla's and Denny's father.

This is the only child of young Bayard's short-lived marriage to Caroline White. According to Jenny Du Pre, Caroline named him Bayard "nine months before it was born" (51). He and his mother both died while Bayard was in France, though Flags in the Dust does not explain the cause.

Johnny Sartoris, the twin brother of Bayard, is one of the two Sartoris ghosts who haunt the present in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust. Confederate Colonel John haunts all his living descendants. 'British' aviator Johnny is instead the shadow that his brother cannot emerge from. He is remembered very fondly by the novel's other characters, and with a great deal of survivor guilt by Bayard. Before World War I Johnny attended the University of Virginia and Princeton University.

Bayard Sartoris names his only son John, after his father the Colonel. This John II is a very minor character, even in Flags in the Dust, the only text to describe him or rather his life in any detail. He married Lucy Cranston, with whom he fathered the twin sons, Bayard (III) and John (III), who are both important characters in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction. Unlike his father, he followed the family's military tradition, fighting for the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. He died in 1901, succumbing to yellow fever and a wound suffered during the war.

This is the first of the four 'Bayards' on the Sartoris family tree. When Colonel John Sartoris' sister Virginia (Aunt Jenny) Du Pre comes to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina, she brings with her the story she loves to tell the younger members of her family about her bother Bayard's death in the Civil War. To her, at least, and in these stories, this Bayard is an incredibly romantic figure, likened to "Richard First . . . before he went crusading" (11). During the Civil War he is Gen. J.E.B.