In her account of the wedding and newlywed life Bayard and Caroline live in Memphis, Miss Jenny mentions "the [aviation] pupils of Bayard's" and his "soldier friends" whom she sees. Like their wives, whom Jenny calls "Young women who ought to have been at home," these are all obviously members of the same "lost" generation as Bayard (51).
The anonymous hillman who moves into Jefferson and builds the house Belle Mitchell lives in came to town with his unnamed and unenumerated "women-folks" (24). In their new lives these women obviously attempt to live like "ladies": they spend the mornings sitting on the veranda and the afternoons riding about wearing "colored silks." But after two years, they return to Frenchman's Bend and, the narrator speculates, their original "poor white" identities.
The house that the Mitchells live in was built, the novel's narrator tells us, by "a hillman who moved in [to Jefferson] from a small settlement called Frenchman's Bend" (24).
Described as "the General's body servant," this unnamed slave provides a kind of sound track to Aunt Jenny's story of Stuart and Carolina Bayard as "two angels valiantly fallen" as he strums a "guitar in lingering random chords" at the Confederate unit's camp (12).
During the Civil War, General Pope was the general in command of the Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run in September, 1862. The story Jenny tells in Flags in the Dust about her brother Bayard accompanying General J.E.B. Stuart's raiding party to Pope's headquarters in Virginia in April, 1862, forms a mythic part of the Sartoris inheritance. In April 1862, however, Pope was in fact in Mississippi. It was his success there that led Lincoln soon afterwards to bring Pope east and put him in command of the North's Army of Virginia.
