Stonewall Jackson Fentry

Text: 
Character Key: 
Display Name: 
Stonewall Jackson Fentry
Sort Name: 
Fentry, Stonewall Jackson
AKA: 
Jackson Fentry
Race: 
White
Gender: 
Male
Class: 
Lower Class
Rank: 
Major
Vitality: 
Alive
Occupation: 
Farming
Real?: 
No
Biography: 

Jackson Fentry is a farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," is the lone juror who holds out against acquitting a man named Bookwright for killing Buck Thorpe after Thorpe seduced his seventeen-year-old daughter. Fentry's behavior prompts Gavin Stevens to spend the story investigating the past that led to this event. Gavin discovers that Buck is the son Fentry adopted decades earlier, the illegitimate child of a young, pregnant, poor-white woman Fentry took in and married just before she died. When he was three, the child was taken away by his mother's relations, to grow up (badly) as a Thorpe, but to Fentry the murdered man everyone else in Yoknapatawpha knows as the ne'er-do-well Buck Thorpe is still "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" (100) - that's the name he gave the baby he had kept alive "just on goat's milk" (98).

Note: 
CUT: At around three years of age, over the resistance of the Fentry's, this adopted child is reclaimed by his mother's family, the Thorpes. He is not heard from again until, as the ne'er do well Buck Thorpe, he is shot by Bookwright. Jackson Fentry's refusal to acquit Bookwright, due to love for his deceased adopted son, is the "mystery" investigated by Gavin Stevens and Chick Mallison.
Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 

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