In "Appendix Compson," Melissa Meek is the "county librarian, a mouse-sized and -colored woman who had never married," and also a former classmate of Caddy Compson who sees a photo of her in occupied France (333). Attempting to "save" Caddy enables Meek to transcend the characterization of her name, her profession, and her lifelong habits (335). Sporting "two feverish spots of determination in her ordinarily colorless cheeks" (333), she enters the feedstore where Jason IV works and where "only men ever entered," and she speaks to him, despite having refused to do so for many years.
Napoleon Bonaparte rose to prominence in France during the French Revolution. In 1804 he proclaimed himself Emperor, and undertook to wage a series of wars in order to achieve dominion over Europe. The allusion to him at the beginning of "Appendix Compson" serves as a template for several of the characters Faulkner will create: dictatorial leaders driven to expand their holdings at all costs.
Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plots that include much drinking, sex, and humor. According to "Appendix Compson," the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" in Faulkner's Jefferson hide the copies of Smith's books that they borrow from and return to the library "carefully wrapped" inside newspapers (333).
The British commander that Charles Stuart Compson fought under in the "Appendix Compson" (326), Banastre Tarleton, was known in England as an outstanding military leader during the Revolutionary War, which he joined at the age of 21. In America, however, Tarleton had a reputation for savagery on the field; he and his men participated in the capture of Charleston, and later became infamous for what Americans called the "Waxhaws Massacre" in South Carolina in 1780.
The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians.
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" remarks "that any woman in Frenchman's Bend and I reckon in the rest of the county too could have described" De Spain's parlor (106).
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111), the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses, as a reference point for the age of his father's Grandfather.
These men and women in "Shall Not Perish" visit the museum in Jefferson "without charge" (111). The narrator says they are "people like us from Frenchman's Bend," by which he seems to mean poor farmers and their families, from "our county or beyond our state too" (111).
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish."
