Sheriff Hampton 2

At least two and probably three of the Yoknapatawpha county sheriffs are named "Hampton." They are all named, or nicknamed, "Hub," except for one "Hope Hampton." They appear in five novels and one short story. While the scholarly consensus is that there are two Sheriff Hamptons, our data suggests that there are three: grandfather, father and son - or perhaps great-grandfather, grandson and great-grandson. Based on our dating of the events in the fictions as well as on the way the "Sheriff Hampton" appears in the texts, we believe Hampton 2 is the sheriff or mentioned in The Town, "An Error in Chemistry," Intruder in the Dust and The Mansion. Intruder describes him as "a countryman, a farmer and the son of farmers" (105), which would make him the grandson of Hampton 1 - but that's not always a clear case. Like the other Hamptons, he's a big man. Like the others, he usually seems good-natured, but according to The Mansion, he is "a meat-eating hard-shell Baptist deacon whose purest notion of pleasure was counting off the folks he personally knowed was already bound for hell" (58). In The Mansion his son succeeds him as sheriff.