Elnora

Although the narrative includes Elnora in its inventory of the "Negroes" who live at the Sartoris place (728), she is as much "white" as she is "black," and belongs to both the families that have lived on the plantation since it was built in the 1830s. On her mother's side she is a Strother, a family that served the Sartorises for many generations, first as slaves and then as servants. Like those Negro ancestors, Elnora lives in a cabin behind the big house. The narrator of Flags in the Dust introduces her as a "mulatto," but the narrator of this story expands on that to identify her as Bayard Sartoris' sister - which is to say that, though John Sartoris never acknowledged her as his child, she and her children are as directly descended from the father of the Yoknapatawpha Sartorises as any of the Bayards and Johns who live in the mansion. Showing no signs of resentment at her place, Elnora is fiercely loyal to the Sartoris family.