The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In The Hamlet, he is a young boy who sees Ratliff's team and buckboard "hid out in the bottom below Armstid's" (387). He reports it to his father who in turn tells the men at Varner's store. In As I Lay Dying, he is named after his father, Lon Quick or "little Lon."

The Old Frenchman came to Yoknapatawpha with a large number of slaves. One of the tasks he gave them was to straighten "the river bed . . . for almost ten miles to keep his land from flooding" (4). They are never described in any detail, but near the end the narrative refers to them as the "progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honkytonks" while their bodies lie buried "beneath the weathered and illegible headstones" in a cemetery that sits on "a knoll four hundred yards away" from the plantation's big house (375).

The novel looks over three decades into the future to describe the eventual end of Jody Varner's invisible bachelorhood in rather stark, but grammatically conditional terms: when Jody turns "sixty five," he "would be caught and married by a creature not yet seventeen probably, who would for the rest of her life continue to take revenge upon him for her whole sex" (352).

Passing by on his wagon, he greets the men at Varner's store.

In The Hamlet, there are at least four children in the Armstid family (393), beginning with the "biggest gal" who is twelve and the "littlest ones" whom she guards at night with an axe (347). This number differs from the earlier "Spotted Horses," but accords with the contemporaneous "Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard" (1932) in which there are four children, all under six years of age and Light in August (1932), where the number increases to five children in six years. (In "Spotted Horses" the oldest Armstid child is named Ina May.)

According to Varner, this "old woman" told his "mammy" that if "a woman showed her belly to the full moon," she would have "a gal" (339).