The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union General who served under Ulysses S. Grant, is famously known for burning Atlanta in 1864, and for "Sherman's March to the Sea," during which his forces destroyed crucial resources and infrastructure in Georgia and the Carolinas, thus crippling the Southern war efforts - or, for the white people of the South, making himself infamous.

Simon is Joby's son and "Ringo's father" (17). A slave when the novel begins, he is John Sartoris' body servant during the war and wears a "Confederate private's coat" when he returns from the war (241). Despite Emancipation, he returns to the Sartoris plantation, either out of loyalty to the Sartorises or to be with his own family or both. He seems grief-stricken by John Sartoris' death, which suggests that their relationship, despite the imbalance of power between enslaved and enslaver, may have been complex.

Bayard describes "the Patroller (sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off)" having caught some of the Satoris slaves away from the plantation (16). In the antebellum South patrollers watched at night to capture any slaves who were out of their quarters without authorization from their owners.

Not much is known about John Sartoris' wife, Rosa Millard's daughter. Her maiden name was Millard, and it can be assumed that she originally came from Memphis (where Rosa Millard and her husband lived). Bayard notes that she "died when I was born," perhaps in giving birth to him (16) - though in Flags in the Dust Bayard has a younger sister. She appears in neither this novel nor any of the other Yoknapatawpha fictions.

Celia Cook lives on South Street in Oxford. She is "a young girl" who, at an early stage in the Civil War, entertains romantic ideas about the Southern soldiers (15). In this account of her, she scratches her name on a window pane "with a diamond ring" while watching Nathan Bedford Forrest ride past her house (15). Faulkner retells this girl's story, with revisions, in two later novels: Intruder in the Dust, where she is not named, and Requiem for a Nun, where her name is Cecelia Farmer.

The historical figure William Barksdale was born in Tennessee but was serving as Congressman from Mississippi at the start of the Civil War. He resigned that office to fight for the Confederacy. He participated in many battles in Virginia and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863.

Among "the names" that Bayard and Ringo hear John Sartoris mention as he talks about the War is "Morgan" (15) John Hunt Morgan was a Confederate Brigadier General who fought in Tennessee, not far from Yoknapatawpha. He was killed at Greeneville, Tennessee, in September, 1864. Morgan was the brother-in-law of Confederate general A.P. Hill.

Born into a very poor family, Forrest became a planter and slave trader. During the Civil War he served in the western theater and rose from Private to Lieutenant General.

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, and never appears directly in Faulkner's fiction. 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. He is buried in the family graveyard at Hawkhurst.

This icon represents the "someone" to whom one of the Negroes in jail is yelling through the window (163). It could just as easily be a woman as a man, but while the race is not specified, other Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which friends and family of black prisoners often gather outside the same window - not to mention the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, which makes it unlikely that a Negro in jail would be yelling at a white person - explain why we assume this "someone" is also black.