Compson

This one-named Compson in this story is the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha: he "came to the settlement a few years ago with a race horse," which he swapped to a Chickasaw chief "a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in the future town of Jefferson" (206). Although not among the settlement's earliest white inhabitants, he becomes the community's unofficial leader: preventing the bandits from being lynched and heading up the committee that confronts Pettigrew over the naming of Jefferson. He is never given a first name, which makes it difficult to figure out which member of the Compson family Faulkner is thinking of, because in different fictions the 'first Yoknapatawpha Compson' is not always the same one. In Absalom! for example it is clearly 'General Compson,' grandfather of Quentin and his siblings; in the "Appendix Compson," he is explicitly identified as General Compson's grandfather, the first Jason Compson, who arrived in Yoknapatawpha and acquired the land in 1811. But given the early date of the story's events, we are identifying "Compson" as Quentin II, the great-grandfather of the Quentin in The Sound and the Fury. In The Mansion, published later than "A Name for the City" but in the same decade, the narrative says that the Chickasaw matron Mahataha granted the property "to Quentin Compson in 1821," which is as close as we can get to the likely date the story's Compson arrived. (Faulkner also included this story in the first section of Requiem for a Nun; in that novel this "Compson" is not given a first name until the last section, but there Faulkner identifies him as Jason, i.e. the first Compson named Jason.)