Elnora Strother

Elnora is explicitly identified as "Simon [Strother]'s tall yellow daughter," but the narrator of Flags in the Dust also calls her a "mulatto woman," which means that one of her parents is black and the other is white (36) - and it is extremely unlikely in Faulkner's world that it would be her mother who is white. The novel says nothing about a white father, however, nor does it explicitly identify her mother, although the narrator of the later short story, "There Was a Queen," identifies Elnora as the mulatto daughter of Colonel John Sartoris and a unnamed mother. Elnora is also the sister of Caspey and the mother of Isom - though Isom's father is not mentioned at all. In "There Was a Queen," she is Caspey's wife and mother of three children: Isom, Joby, and Saddie. In both fictions she is a servant in the Sartoris household, but here her "endless minor" (20), the constant singing she does while at work in the kitchen, provides a kind of soundtrack for many of the scenes set at the Sartoris mansion.