The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. They are already in the county by the 1830s, and still a presence there, though a very diminished one, in the 1940s. But it is not easy to identify the "Mrs. Compson" who appears in this story. Bayard says she is "was older than Granny" (62). Chronologically, she should be the wife of the General Compson who is the grandfather of the children in The Sound and the Fury and to whom Judith Sutpen delivers a letter during the War in Absalom, Absalom! - this is the "Mrs.
A house slave on the Sartoris plantation before the War, Louvinia continues to work for the family after it ends and she has been emancipated. She shares her cabin with them after the big house is destroyed, works with her husband Joby to make the lumber out of which it will be rebuilt, and shows how deeply she can sympathize with their sorrows when she holds a crying Drusilla, Bayard says, "like she used to hold me" (65). She is described as wearing "Father's old hat on top of her headrag" (65), but there is no suggestion that in her case men's clothing implies any sort of rebellion.
A slave before the War, Joby continues to work for the Sartoris family after it ends and he has been emancipated; in this story he is helping to make the lumber out of which a new mansion will be built. He is Louvinia's husband.
One of the more memorable women in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, Drusilla Hawk was born into the plantation aristocracy, where her role as a lady seemed clearly defined - until the Civil War gave her the opportunity to redefine it. After her father and fiance are killed at the Battle of Shiloh, she "deliberately tries to unsex" herself (60), according to her appalled mother, by refusing to mourn them and instead "cutting her hair and putting on men's clothes" (59) to join the Confederate unit led by her cousin, John Sartoris, in the fighting.
In Flags in the Dust the Benbows are identified as one of the oldest and most prominent Yoknapatawpha families, though they do not figure among the county's large plantation owners. In this story they appear only as the antebellum owners of a "carriage" and the slave - "Uncle Cash," or Cassius - who drove it (66).
The "scrip dollar" that replaces Confederate money in Jefferson is "drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County" (66). All we see of this functionary in the story is his "neat clerk's hand[writing]" (66), but presumably he is one of the Northerners working in the defeated South for one of the Reconstruction agencies.
Before the Civil War, Cassius was called "Uncle Cash"; he was enslaved by the Benbow family and worked as their carriage driver (66). He is illiterate. During the War he "run off with the Yankees" (66), but has returned to Jefferson and been appointed "Acting Marshal" by the northerners who are trying to reconstruct the town's government (66). It is his possible election as Marshal that precipitates the story's climax.
While no Union troops appear directly in the story, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. 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 (58). 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 (65). Drusilla tries to explain to the ladies that she joined John's unit "to hurt Yankees" (65).
While most of the former slaves in Faulkner's fiction remain with the white families that owned them before the Civil War (for example, Ringo, Louvinia and Joby in this story), several of the fictions acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved blacks who simply left the plantations to quest for freedom by following the Union armies as they moved through the South.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States and the Union's leader during the Civil War, would already have been dead when John Sartoris mentions him as having promised "to send us troops" to help restore order to the South after it surrendered (65). Before his assassination, Lincoln did urge compassion and a form of political forgiveness for the defeated Confederacy, but there is no clear basis for Sartoris' claim.
