The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

John Hunt Morgan was a Confederate Brigadier General who was fought in Tennessee, not far from Yoknapatawpha. The Grier narrator notes that his great-grandfather would holler "Morgan," among other names, while dozing "in his chair under the mulberry in the yard or on the sunny end of the front gallery or in his corner by the hearth" (112).

Bedford Forrest ended the Civil War as a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army. He was active in the fighting around the Yoknapatawpha area. The Grier narrator notes that his great-grandfather would holler "Forrest," among other names, while dozing "in his chair under the mulberry in the yard or on the sunny end of the front gallery or in his corner by the hearth" (112).

The man the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" calls "Grandpap" is actually his father's grandfather. Sounding like the boy he is, the narrator says he is "old, so old you just wouldn't believe it" (111). In his dotage all he talks about is "the Confederate war," though the narrative does not say how he was involved in the Civil War (112). (The narrator's mother's grandfather also served in the Civil War, but his last name wouldn't have been Grier.)

The narrator and his mother tour an art museum in Jefferson that contains "pictures from all over the United States, painted by people who loved what they had seen or where they had been born or lived enough to want to paint pictures of it so that other people could see it too" (110). These works of art, and the people who created them, fuel the Grier boy's imagination.

The narrator mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish."

Mentioned by Mrs. Grier when she is consoling Major de Spain for the loss of his son: "my grandfather was in that old [war] there too, and I reckon his mother didn't know why either, but I reckon he did" (109).

Mentioned by Mrs. Grier when she is consoling Major de Spain for the loss of his son: "my grandfather was in that old one there too" (109), meaning the Civil War.

Mrs. Grier notes that her "mother didn't know why" her son, Marsh, had to go to war any more than she (Mrs. Grier) knew why her son, Pete, had to go to war.

Mrs. Grier mentions her brother, who fought in World War I: "my brother went to the war when I was a girl" (109). This brother is also mentioned - by his name, Marsh - in "Two Soldiers."

Major de Spain refers to his son's "forefathers [who] fought and died for [their country] then, even though what they fought and lost for was a dream" (108). "Then" is "eighty years ago," and as the word "lost" suggests, the country he is talking about was the Confederacy; these forefathers fought against the United States. De Spain's unreconstructed attitude explains why he covers his son's coffin with "the Confederate flag" (107).