Luster

Luster is a teenager who spends every day taking care of Benjy. On the day with which the novel begins he also wants to find the quarter that he lost so he can go to what he calls "the show" (a kind of circus) that is playing in Jefferson that night (3). The next day, Easter Sunday, he keeps trying to figure out how to "play a tune on a saw," like the performer in the show (15). Luster exaggerates his authority over Benjy when he tells a group of other blacks that "I whips him" (15), but Dilsey often has to upbraid him for neglecting, teasing or at times bullying Benjy. Luster is the son of Frony, and grandson of Dilsey. The novel's only mention of his father is Dilsey's vague threat, "You just wait till your pappy come home" (59). While there's good reason to assume this man is Frony's legal husband, there's not evidence to assume that he is the pullman porter in St. Louis to whom Frony is married in Faulkner's "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury, written nineteen years after the novel.