"John Sartoris' mother" is never named, and mentioned only once in the novel, when the colored glass that adorns a door in the Sartoris mansion is described as her "deathbed legacy to her son" (10). It is her daughter Jenny who carries the glass from Carolina to Yoknapatawpha, in 1869.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Sat, 2013-02-16 20:19
Gaunt and malaria-ridden, Wash Jones emerges as a furious underdog figure. A poor and jobless squatter, he lives with his granddaughter Milly in Thomas Sutpen's “crazy shack” on a slough in the river bottom of Sutpen’s land. During the Civil War, he was one of the few remaining white men in Yoknapatawpha between 18-50 who did not enlist in the war, and he was often teased because of it. When Sutpen returned from the war, Wash helped him manage a country store, which also meant Wash had to care for Sutpen when he was drunk.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Mon, 2013-02-11 18:10
Described as "the little store which Sutpen managed to set upon the highroad" (539) after he finished serving in the Civil War, this is the place where Wash works as "clerk and porter" (539). Wash and Sutpen drink whiskey in the rear of the building just as they drank in the scuppernong arbor in the years before the war.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Mon, 2013-02-11 18:06
After the Civil War, when his plantation has almost all been sold away from him, Sutpen's sole source of income is the "little crossroads store" he opens, "with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons" (Absalom!, 147). According to "Wash," it sits "upon the highroad" (539). In both texts its customers are the poor whites and blacks who live in the area. Wash Jones clerks in the store, and he and Sutpen regularly drink whiskey in the rear of the building just as they drank in the scuppernong arbor in the years before the war.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Mon, 2013-02-11 18:04
The scuppernong on Sutpen's Plantation is where Sutpen and Wash would "spend whole afternoons . . . taking drink for drink from the same demijohn" (538).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Mon, 2013-02-11 18:01
The grounds of Sutpen's plantation in both "Wash" and Absalom! include a "scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen where on Sunday afternoons [Wash] and Sutpen would drink from [a] demijohn" (538, 99). In the novel, Sutpen gets to lie in a "barrel stave hammock" while Wash, after fetching a bucket of water from a spring "almost a mile away," pours the whisky and water and "squats against a post" (99). In "Wash" the water is from a "cistern" (538). Scuppernongs are a variety of grape native to the South.
