The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and the place of its various members on the family tree is usually very well established. But it is not easy to identify the man to whom Mrs. Compson refers as her husband in this chapter. Bayard notes that this man was "locked up for crazy a long time ago," and relates without comment how he used to amuse himself on the Compson plantation by shooting sweet potatoes off the heads of slave children with a rifle (193).

This man drives Mrs. Compson out to the Sartoris place.

One of Roth Edmonds' grievances against Lucas Beauchamp is that, when he would speak to the white man in the presence of "a group of young negroes," he would "lump" black and white "all together as 'you boys'" (112).

The "Mrs. Edmonds" who is Cass Edmonds' mother may be Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin's granddaughter, or she may be the wife of McCaslin's grandson - depending on whether her mother or she herself married a man named Edmonds. The novel doesn't allow us to decide between these alternatives. All it says about this character is that she died, presumably when her son was very young: his grandmother, McCaslin's daughter, "raised him following his mother's death" (9).

The Beauchamp property is a large cotton plantation, with an unspecified but clearly large number of slaves who work either in the house or in the fields. "Four or five" of these slaves appear in "Was" when they bring horses for the hunt for Tomey's Turl. During the Civil War most of them leave; according to the narrator, the "ones that didn't go" are the ones that their master, Hubert Beauchamp, "could not have wanted" (287).

In the chapter "Skirmish at Sartoris" the Union forces are defined, and described, by the absence after the War. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (198).

This icon represents the men who work with John Sartoris to resist any effort to give voting rights to the recently emancipated slaves. According to Bayard, "all the men in the county" and "all the other men in Jefferson" (204, 188) assemble in the town square "with pistols in their pockets" (204) to prevent black men from voting, and ride out afterwards with John and Drusilla to cast their own votes in the election at the Sartoris place.

According to Bayard, "all the women in Jefferson" travel out to the Sartoris plantation on several occasions (187): to confront Drusilla for her unlady-like behavior and to attend the wedding that will ceremonialize her return to their fold. The first time they appear, there are "fourteen of them," though that total includes Martha Habersham (194). They all seem both curious and outraged by what they see. The narrative juxtaposes the mission of these ladies to the work John Sartoris and their husbands are doing "back in Jefferson" to preserve their white male power (194).

The Habersham family figures in Faulkner's fiction as one of the founders of Yoknapatawpha. Martha Habersham figures in this novel as the most determined among the Jefferson ladies who pressure Drusilla to behave like a woman. Convinced that Drusilla and John Sartoris' relationship is sexual, Mrs. Habersham takes the lead in planning the wedding between them.

Along with her son, this "woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth" (164) is a victim of Grumby and his men. Bayard vividly describes her voice as she describes the gang; it sounds "light and far away like a locust from across a pasture" (164).