Character Keys

This is the first of the four 'Bayards' on the Sartoris family tree. When Colonel John Sartoris' sister Virginia (Aunt Jenny) Du Pre comes to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina, she brings with her the story she loves to tell the younger members of her family about her bother Bayard's death in the Civil War. To her, at least, and in these stories, this Bayard is an incredibly romantic figure, likened to "Richard First . . . before he went crusading" (11). During the Civil War he is Gen. J.E.B.

Bayard Sartoris names his only son John, after his father the Colonel. This John II is a very minor character, even in Flags in the Dust, the only text to describe him or rather his life in any detail. He married Lucy Cranston, with whom he fathered the twin sons, Bayard (III) and John (III), who are both important characters in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction. Unlike his father, he followed the family's military tradition, fighting for the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. He died in 1901, succumbing to yellow fever and a wound suffered during the war.

Johnny Sartoris, the twin brother of Bayard, is one of the two Sartoris ghosts who haunt the present in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust. Confederate Colonel John haunts all his living descendants. 'British' aviator Johnny is instead the shadow that his brother cannot emerge from. He is remembered very fondly by the novel's other characters, and with a great deal of survivor guilt by Bayard. Before World War I Johnny attended the University of Virginia and Princeton University.

This is the only child of young Bayard's short-lived marriage to Caroline White. According to Jenny Du Pre, Caroline named him Bayard "nine months before it was born" (51). He and his mother both died while Bayard was in France, though Flags in the Dust does not explain the cause.

Like John Sartoris, Dennison Hawk was a large plantation- and slave-owner who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War; he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. He never appears directly in the fictions, but is mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. His Alabama plantation, Hawkhurst, was burned by the Yankees sometime after his death. He is the husband of Louisa, who is Granny's sister, and hence he is Bayard's uncle as well as Drusilla's and Denny's father.

Like their mother, John Sartoris' two daughters are almost invisible members of the family. This is the older of the pair, Bayard's older sister. She is twenty-two when Jenny Du Pre arrives in Mississippi in 1869; beyond that she is not named or described. From one of Will Falls' stories in Flags in the Dust we learn that she and her younger sister were sent to Memphis during the Civil War; the narrator tells us later that she is planning to marry in June, 1870.

Rosa Millard - "Granny" to two boys, one white and one black - is one of Faulkner's most formidable old women. As John Sartoris' mother-in-law, she runs his plantation while he's away fighting in the Civil War.

First mentioned but not named by Will Falls in Flags in the Dust when he mentions that Bayard's two sisters went to stay with his "gran'pappy" in Memphis during the Civil War (20), he comes into a little more focus in "My Grandmother Millard" when Bayard notes that his grandmother's dead husband owned a "supply house" in Memphis (688). One of his customers was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who (although the story never mentions it) was a well-known Memphis planter and slave-dealer at that time.

The husband of Virginia Sartoris (Aunt Jenny) is a man named Du Pre. According to The Unvanquished, one of the two fictions in which he is mentioned, he was "killed at the very beginning of the War, by a shell from a Federal frigate at Fort Moultrie" (235). Fort Moultrie was one of the forts in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, and it's very likely that Du Pre, like the Sartorises, was from "Cal-lina" - as Elnora calls it in "There Was a Queen," the other text in which Jenny's husband is mentioned (732).

Old Bayard's wife, the grandmother of Young Bayard and Young John Sartoris, is never named, and mentioned only in passing in Flags in the Dust, when that novel sums up the history of the parlor in the Sartoris mansion over the decades. We're told that she and her daughter-in-law and Miss Jenny clean the room "thoroughly" twice a year. There are exactly two words devoted to her: "his wife" (55).

In Flags in the Dust, Caroline White is the Memphis girl who met and married (Young) Bayard Sartoris when he was teaching flying lessons in that city. She is identified mainly by her "wild bronze swirling" hair (45), but she is also recognizably a modern woman: she has no proper ideas about "keeping house," at least according to Jenny (51), and the narrator refers to "the brittle daring of her speech and actions" (73). She and her newborn son died, perhaps of influenza, in 1918, while her husband was fighting overseas in World War I.

As a family the Benbows are one of the oldest and most prominent in Jefferson, but the fictions don't provide much detail about the first several generations in town. "Judge Benbow" is mentioned in three fictions from the middle of Faulkner's career. In Absalom! he is mentioned twice: first as a paragon of genteel manners (35), and later as the unofficial executor of the (non-existent) "Estate of Goodhue Coldfield" who chivalrously takes care of Rosa over the years (172); he also has a son named Percy.

In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation.

Julia Benbow, the wife of Will Benbow, and mother of Horace and Narcissa, is mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. According to the first novel, she died when Narcissa was seven years old. Narcissa remembers her as "a gentle figure . . . like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread" (172). She is not named in the second novel, and appears only in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" in conversations with Horace (184).

In the larger narrative of Yoknapatawpha Horace Benbow's place is a curious one. One of the two central characters in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Horace becomes the first major recurring character in the canon when Faulkner casts him as the protagonist of Sanctuary. After that second appearance he essentially disappears.

Born into slavery, Louvinia appears in two novels and seven stories as the cook at the Sartoris plantation and, along with her husband Joby, the head of the enslaved family that serves the Sartorises over many generations. When we first meet her, in the story Will Falls tells in Flags in the Dust about the day the Yankees arrived at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, Louvinia is "shellin' a bowl of peas fer supper" (20); she helps her master escape out the back door.

Loosh - or Lucius, as he's called in "My Grandmother Millard" and, presumably, as he was actually named - appears or is mentioned in four of the Unvanquished stories as well as "My Grandmother." Biologically, he is the son of Joby and Louvinia, the husband of Philadelphy, and the uncle of Ringo. Thematically, he is the only slave on the Sartoris plantation (and one of the few in the Yoknapatawpha fictions) who openly rebels against his enslavement.

Euphrony is briefly mentioned in Flags in the Dust as Simon's dead wife, which presumably also makes her the mother of Elnora and Caspey (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it seems to follow that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel makes no attempt to explore that issue. On the other hand, in "There Was a Queen" Elnora's mother is not named, but her (white) father is identified as Colonel John Sartoris. Again, however, no more is said about that.

This Joby is Elnora's son and the (presumably) older brother of Isom and Saddie. The only information we have about him is that he has "gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street" (727). He plays no role in the plot of the story. (There is another Joby in the Strother family - during the Civil War he is a slave and afterwards a servant of the Sartorises - but he is the great-grandfather of this Joby. This Joby only appears in "There Was a Queen.")

Isom is Elnora's only child in Flags in the Dust, "a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound" (20). He is responsible for a number of chores around the Sartoris household, but most enjoys wearing Caspey's military uniform and taking the wheel of Bayard's car. There is no hint of how, if at all, he is being educated. He is at the wheel of a car again ten years later in Sanctuary, where he is "the negro driver" who works for Narcissa Sartoris (110) - and the only member of the Strother family who is included in the novel.

In Flags in the Dust Caspey is the son of Simon Strother and the brother of Elnora. He is also one of the five men in the novel who are returning from France after the end of World War I. Caspey served in a non-combatant role with the U.S. Army over there; when he returned home to Jefferson, he brought with him some wildly exaggerated tales about his military service, and a set of new ideas about racial equality which made his family very nervous and drove Old Bayard to knock him down with a stick of stove wood.

According to the early genealogy that Faulkner's 1946 "Appendix" creates for the Compson family, Charles Stuart Compson is the first member to be born in the new world. Named after Charles Stuart the Young Pretender, for whom his father fought in Scotland, Charles Stuart Compson served under the British commander Banastre Tarleton in the American Revolutionary War; Charles Stuart was thus part of the military serving the monarchy his father had formerly opposed.

There are a few references to Quentin's great-grandfather in the early fictions about the family. In The Sound and The Fury Mr. Compson mentions him when he gives Quentin his grandfather's watch (76). In "A Justice" Sam Fathers tells Quentin the "your great-grandpappy" bought him and his mother as slaves (344).

The third Compson named Jason and the father of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy was born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War and as a result, his story suggests, grew up to become what Faulkner's "Appendix Compson" calls a "cultured dipsomaniac" (335). His story, however, is never directly told. Instead, his character is defined chiefly by his role in the life and death of his oldest son, Quentin. "Father said" is a phrase that sounds again and again from the first to the penultimate page of Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury (76, 178).

Speaking outside the pages of his art, Faulkner called Caddy Compson his "heart's darling," and The Sound and the Fury his attempt to draw her "picture." It's a very modern portrait, however, defined by her absence everywhere in the novel except in the minds of her three brothers, each of whom attempts to fill the absences at the center of his own life with what he tries to make her represent or (to use the term that is both there and absent in the novel's Shakespearean title) to 'signify.' On her own terms, Caddy almost too good to be believable.

Benjy Compson is one of the most original characters in American literature. To Mrs. Compson, who originally named him Maury in honor of her brother, Benjy's severe mental handicap is shameful, and a reason to change his name to Benjamin - apparently on her son Quentin's suggestion, though tellingly he gets the Biblical significance of the name Benjamin wrong.

In The Sound and the Fury Caroline Compson is the sister of Maury Bascomb (Uncle Maury), the wife of Jason Compson III, and the mother of Quentin, Candace, Jason and Maury|Benjamin. She is probably also the daughter of the woman called "Damuddy" whose death is the earliest event (and loss) in Benjy and Quentin's memories. A bed-ridden neurotic and a hypochondriac, Caroline seems hopelessly preoccupied with herself. She is obsessed with the social standing of the Bascomb family and largely oblivious to the misery of her own.

The "Mrs. Compson" who appears in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished is a hard character to identify. Throughout the other four Unvanquished stories that mention "Mrs. Compson" it seems clear that she is married to General (Quentin) Compson, who is off fighting the Civil War until the final story, "Odor of Verbena," when he makes a brief appearance (245). But in "Skirmish at Sartoris," readers are told that the "only husband [Mrs.

In the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, the family line begins with this man: a printer in Glasgow, Scotland, who is the father of Quentin MacLachan Compson. Apparently he died when his son was still a child (326).

Dilsey is the matriarch of the Gibson family and the source of whatever emotional stability there is in the Compson family. A major character in The Sound and the Fury, she is married to Roskus, the mother of Versh, Frony, and T.P., and the grandmother of Luster. She is a devout Christian, a loyal servant and a very caring human being. As a character she is both related to the "mammy" stereotype and one of Faulkner's most dignified and impressive creations.

In The Sound and the Fury Versh Gibson is the first-born son of Roskus and Dilsey. In the earliest scenes that Benjy remembers, he works as Benjy's caretaker. Sometime before his father's death he has moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis; Dilsey blames her husband for his "bad luck talk" that "got them Memphis notions into Versh" (31). He is mentioned again, briefly, in "That Evening Sun," but otherwise does not appear again in the fictions - not even in "Appendix Compson," where his mother, sister, brother and nephew are described living in Memphis in the early 1940s.

Frony Gibson is a member of the black family that lives on the Compson place as servants, and the daughter of Roskus and Dilsey. In The Sound and the Fury she appears in Benjy's memories as a child about the same age as Quentin and Caddy Compson, and in the last section as an adult who still lives close enough to Dilsey to walk to church with her mother on Easter Sunday. She is also Luster's mother, though the novel does not indicate if she has a husband or if, like Caddy's daughter, Luster was conceived out of wedlock.

This man is the "pullman porter" mentioned in "Appendix Compson" whom Frony Gibson marries and moves to St. Louis to live with (343). He may be dead - that would be one explanation for the fact that Frony later moves to Memphis "to make a home for her mother" (343) - but the text does not say so, nor does it give him a name. It's also possible that this character is the man whom Dilsey refers to as Luster's "pappy" in The Sound and the Fury (59), though there's not enough textual evidence to establish that connection.

The only detail about Virginius MacCallum's ancestry provided in Flags in the Dust is that he received a mule from his father when he first got married. That one detail, however, makes it likely that his father also lived in Yoknapatawpha, and that he was a small farmer.

The youngest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family is Buddy. He first appears in Flags in the Dust as a kind of foil to Bayard Sartoris: both have served in World War I - Buddy has a combat medal to show how well he fought - but Buddy is not a member of any 'lost generation.' He returns to Yoknapatawpha, resumes his place in the yeoman family (though he doesn't display the medal, in deference to his un-reconstructed ex-Confederate father who refuses to believe his son fought in a "Yankee" army, 342), and continues his life as a countryman and avid hunter.

The eldest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family, Jackson is named for the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, under whom his father served in the Civil War. He appears as a minor character in two texts. In Flags in the Dust he is described as "a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus" (337). Much to his father's disgust, he is attempting to transform hunting by interbreeding a fox and a hound.

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Rafe, Stuart is named after the famous Confederate cavalry general, J.E.B. Stuart. He also appears in As I Lay Dying, but not as Stuart - because Samson cannot remember his first name. Like his brothers, he is a 'tall man': honorable, strong, stoic.

In Flags in the Dust Virginius MacCallum has two wives. Both have died before the novel takes place. The first of them was clearly a country girl of humble origins: her dowry consisted of a clock and "a dressed hog" (332). The novel does not mention anything else about her, but what it says later about the second wife - Buddy's mother, from whom he gets his coloring - suggests this wife was the mother of Virginius' five other sons: unlike Buddy, for instance, they all have "brown eyes and black hair" (354).

Anse McCallum is one of Buddy McCallum's twin sons in "The Tall Men": "two absolutely identical blue-eyed youths" (49) who are mentioned together as "the twin McCallum nephews" of Rafe in "Knight's Gambit" (210). He also appears, but without any mention of his twin brother, The Town. In the first story he and his brother Lucius have identical histories. They are "wild as spikehorn bucks" as children (55). Later, they go to the agricultural college to learn how to raise whiteface cattle.

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," Lee is described in the novel as the "least talkative of them all"; his face is "a dark, saturnine mask" and his eyes are "black and restless," with "something wild and sad" lurking in them" (334). He plays almost no part in the events in the short story. Like most of the MacCallums, he is named for a prominent Confederate - Robert E. Lee.

As evoked in Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen's mother was "a mountain woman," "bred in the mountains," but in her case the mountains were in Scotland (195). According to Sutpen, she "never did quite learn to speak English" (195). Her husband calls her "a fine wearying woman," and it is suggested that she made him move from coastal Virginia to the mountains (180). Her death precipitates the husband's decision to return east; since there is an infant in the family when the move starts, it seems likely that she died in childbirth.

Thomas Sutpen comes from a large family, though Absalom! doesn't say exactly how large. He has at least two older brothers: these "two older boys" leave home "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181). This is the brother who "had been as far West as the Mississippi River one time" even before the family left the mountains (183).

Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters: according to the narrative in Absalom!, "one of the sisters" altered their father's hand-me-down clothes to fit the young Thomas (185). This entry is for the "sister" who, during the family's move from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia, gives birth in "a cowshed" to an illegitimate child (183), and gets pregnant again, though "still unmarried" (181), while they are still traveling.

This is the first of the two illegitimate Sutpen children in Absalom! that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to during the family's journey across Virginia; he or she was born in "a cowshed" (183).

"The first Sutpen" in North America, according to Quentin's narrative in Absalom!, "probably" arrived in Jamestown on a "ship from the Old Bailey" - i.e. a ship transporting convicted criminals from London to the British colony of Virginia (180).

In Absalom! the first wife of Thomas Sutpen and the mother of Charles Bon is not given a name until the "Genealogy" that appears after the narrative proper, where she is identified as "Eulalia Bon" (307). She is the "Haiti-born" daughter of a French sugar planter (268). When she first appears in the narrative, it is as "a shadow that almost emerged for a moment and then faded again" (199) - the elusiveness of this is entirely appropriate.

In Absalom!, the "little boy" in the picture that is found on Charles Bon's body (75) is Bon's "sixteenth part negro son" (80); his grandiloquent name is Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon. When Judith and Clytemnestra bring him from New Orleans to Sutpen's Hundred after his mother dies, Judith tells him to "Call me Aunt Judith" (169), perhaps without realizing that he is in fact her half-nephew and her father's grandson.

In Absalom! Clytemnestra (Clytie) is the daughter of Thomas Sutpen and one of the two enslaved women he brings with him to Yoknapatawpha. She is first mentioned by Rosa, as the "negro girl" with a "Sutpen face" beside Judith Sutpen, Clytie's half-sister (22); later Rosa refers to her "Sutpen coffee-colored face" (109). Sutpen "named [Clytemnestra] himself," after a legendary Greek queen, though Mr. Compson "likes to believe" that Sutpen "intended to name her Cassandra," after another figure from Greek tragedy (48).

Sutpen's daughter Judith first appears in the prequel to Absalom!, the short story "Wash"; though her character is barely sketched, her actions often anticipate her story in the novel. As "Miss Judith" she lives alone in the big house on the Sutpen plantation during much of the Civil War, after the deaths of her mother and brother and while her father is away fighting (541).