Lucius Priest is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black. While other characters remember his class status, he himself is distinguished by his ability to appreciate the various people he encounters - prostitutes, gamblers, blacks - for their human strengths and weaknesses.
Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Thu, 2015-12-03 15:03
These undescribed "white people" call Sam Fathers "a Negro," as distinct from "the Negroes [who] call him a blue-gum" (343). This group may be whites who live near Sam and the Negroes on the Compson farm, or the phrase could refer to all white people who know Sam.
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Thu, 2015-12-03 14:58
Sam Fathers lives among Negroes in the quarters on the Compson farm. They apparently work the Compson land on shares as tenant farmers, and they distinguish themselves from Sam by calling him "a blue-gum" (343), or "Uncle Blue-Gum" (344).
In this last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight, or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278).
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Wed, 2015-12-02 15:56
Roskus is a prominent character in The Sound and the Fury (1929), though in this story he is mentioned only briefly as driving the surrey that carries Grandfather Compson, Quentin, Caddy, and Jason to the Compson family farm.
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Wed, 2015-12-02 15:45
Jason Compson, Quentin's younger brother, is a major character in The Sound and the Fury (1929), but is mentioned by Quentin only in passing in this story as accompanying him, Caddy, and Grandfather on Saturday trips to the Compson farm.
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Wed, 2015-12-02 15:31
Caddy Compson is described by her older brother Quentin simply as "a girl"; he gives that as the reason she spends most of the story offstage, fishing with their younger brother Jason at "the creek" on the farm (343). But the detail that Quentin provides at the end, when he notices that "she was wet to the waist" (360), may remind readers of The Sound and the Fury of the major role Caddy plays in that novel, which was published in 1929, two years before the story.
