Jim Bond

In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296). Both his parents were legally 'black,' according to the Jim Crow laws of the South, but Shreve says he "had inherited what he was from his mother and only what he could never have been from his father" (174). Shreve also says, on the penultimate page of the novel, that "the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere" (302).