Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Sat, 2014-05-10 01:50
He is Joanna Burden's half-brother, "dark like [their] father's mother's people and like his mother" (248). He and his grandfather, also named Calvin, are murdered in the middle of Jefferson by Colonel Sartoris during Reconstruction "over a question of negro votes in a state election" (47). At the time of his death, as Joanna puts it, he is "a boy who had never even cast his first vote" (249).
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Sat, 2014-05-10 01:38
An important patriarch in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction, Colonel Sartoris is the ex-slaveholder and Confederate soldier who kills Joanna Burden's grandfather Calvin Burden I and her brother Calvin Burden II on the Jefferson square in 1874 "over a question of negro votes in a state election" (47).
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Sat, 2014-05-10 01:23
Tenth child of a Unitarian minister in New England, Calvin I hopes to teach his children "'to hate two things . . . hell and slaveholders'" (243). He loses one of his arms fighting against slavery as "a member of a troop of partisan guerilla horse" in 1861 (244). Then, during Reconstruction, he moves with his son to Yoknapatawpha with the goal of advocating for the rights of freedmen. There he is killed by Colonel John Sartoris, an event Faulkner had previously described in Flags in the Dust (and would describe again in The Unvanquished).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:17
The Delta, also called the Mississippi Delta, is a region in northwest Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Its economy has traditionally been dominated by cotton farming. Jason Compson mentions it because he thinks it may be flooded soon, ruining the cotton crops.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:14
The "Delta" is a 7000-square-mile alluvial flood plain in Mississippi, lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Its economy has traditionally been dominated by cotton farming. During the years covered by the Yoknapatawpha fictions it frequently flooded, a possibility that is on Jason Compson's mind in The Sound and the Fury as he thinks about his speculation in the cotton market.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:13
Nicaragua (spelled "Nicarauga" to represent Jason Compson's speech in The Sound and the Fury) is a country in Central America bordered by Honduras and Costa Rica. Jason mentions it because he is mad that the United States government maintains a military presence there.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:10
Jason rails against the Federal Government in Washington, D.C. for "spending fifty thousand dollars a day keeping an army in Nicarauga or some place" (234).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:07
Nicaragua (spelled "Nicarauga" in The Sound and the Fury) is a country in Central America bordered by Honduras and Costa Rica. It was occupied by U.S. military forces between 1912 and 1933 - which is another item on the list of things that make Jason Compson mad.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Fri, 2014-05-02 08:05
George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr., played baseball for the New York Yankees from 1920-1934. He was the most famous athlete in the U.S. in 1928, and is still regarded as one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Jason Compson nevertheless does not think very highly of his skills.
