Virginius MacCallum I|Anse McCallum

The patriarch of the family that first appears in Flags in the Dust as the MacCallums and then re-appears in the 1940s as the McCallums also has two first names: Virginius (in Flags) and then Anse (in The Hamlet and "The Tall Men"). At the start of the Civil War he walked from Mississippi to Virginia to enlist (because his mother came from Virginia) and served til the surrender at Appomattox. After the war he walked home, married, and (as a character puts it in "The Tall Men") "started getting them boys" (54) - his six (or five) sons, who continue to live in the house he built in the northeastern corner of Yoknapatawpha. He appears as a very 'unreconstructed' Confederate in Flags, he is referred to in The Hamlet as one of the men who bought a Texas pony at the auction in Frenchman's Bend, and he's been dead for about fifteen years before "The Tall Men" takes place. The exact number of his wives and his sons varies. However, his legacy as a "tall man" - a member of the yeoman caste and as a representative of the best traditions of the Old South - continues through the generations of sons and grandsons.