The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Jack Houston lives with this woman for four years in El Paso, after taking her out of a Galveston brothel seven years before. Although they are never married, she is recognized among the El Paso townsfolk as his wife. He renounces their common law marriage to return to Yoknapatawpha. His wife offers to accompany him to Mississippi and to tolerate the woman he expects to marry, but she curses him repeatedly when he abandons her and leaves her half of his savings.

This man is a tenant farmer who works land owned by Jack Houston's father. Jack engages in a relationship with his daughter (228).

This is the daughter of one of Jack Houston's father's renters. Jack Houston has a relationship with her. She is "two or three years" Houston's senior (228).

A "fierce thin wiry man" (233), Jack Houston's father is a farmer of some wealth with a large section of land that is worked by sharecroppers. He has a somewhat strained relationship with his son, whom he teaches to farm. His eventual death causes Jack to return home after thirteen years away.

An orphan raised by a distant kinswoman, Lucy Pate is a "plain girl, almost homely," but possesses "the domestic skill of her country heritage and blood" and "an infinite capacity for constancy and devotion" (227). Jack Houston falls obsessively in love with her from an early age, but he refuses to accept the taunts of their schoolmates, who tease him about the academic help Lucy gives him. Houston's decision to run off may be connected to Eula Varner's pregnancy, but he is also desperate to get away from Lucy.

Under indictment for stealing a "drummer's sample-case of shoes, all of the right foot" (218), this Snopes married a schoolteacher and fathered one son with her before her untimely death. (A "drummer" is a traveling salesman.)

Lump Snopes' mother was one "of a moil of sisters and brothers" (218). 'Moil' is an archaic term that can mean 'confusion,' so the sense of this is that she was one of many children; this reading is confirmed when the narrator notes that her father was "a congenital failure" who "begot . . . more children whom he could not quite feed" (218).

The mother of Lump Snopes' mother is "whining and sluttish" woman who keeps having children (218).

This Snopes was a "congenital failure" (218), living in a state of perpetual bankruptcy and fathering numerous children.

A "thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat," Lump's mother grew up in a large family plagued by "a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies" (218). Despite her desire to better herself through education and teaching, she married a "man under indictment" and gave birth to a son that she named after the Arthurian knight Launcelot as an act of "quenchless defiance" against her fate (218). She died soon after.