Central Station in Memphis had ten tracks when it opened in 1914. It was built on the site of the Calhoun Street Station, which in 1905 Minnie refers to as "the Frisco depot" in The Reivers, because the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway ran in and out of Memphis on some of those tracks. Central Station was a busy place in the era before the automobile displaced the train, full of the "streams of people" who repeatedly "jostle" Virgil Snopes and Fonzo Winbush when they get off the train around 1929 to begin their misadventures in the big city (Sanctuary, 189).
In The Reivers Boon tells Lucius Priest that 'Miss Reba's' is "a kind a boarding house" (93), and in Sanctuary Virgil Snopes and Fonzo Snopes live there for some time on the assumption that it is a boarding house, one where the landlady has a lot of daughters. But of course Miss Reba's place is a brothel, one of several in Memphis' notorious red-light district which lay at "the foot of the bluff below Main Street" (Sanctuary, 142).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 20:19
Identified in this story only as "that book-keeper in Colonel Sartoris' bank" and "the man who robbed the bank" (739, 740), Byron is one of the many cousins whom Flem Snopes brings into Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend. His miserable attempt to court the aristocratic Narcissa Benbow by writing her obscene, anonymous letters figures prominently in the narrative of Flags in the Dust.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 20:10
The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not begin investigating bank robberies until the Depression, a decade after the Sartoris bank was robbed. But Faulkner is almost certainly thinking of the F.B.I. when he has Narcissa identify the man with whom she has sex as "a Federal agent" who came into possession of the letters she is anxious to get back while pursuing "the man who had robbed the bank" (740).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 20:04
Though only mentioned in this story as "her brother" (735), Narcissa's brother Horace is one of the central characters in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary, the two novels that form the imaginative background to this story. As explained in the first of those books, he was "also in France" during the First World War as a noncombatant, working with the YMCA (735).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 19:59
Simon Strother's wife and Elnora's mother. Until the end of the Civil War, she would have been a slave. Based on what the narrative says about (Old) Bayard as Elnora's "half-brother" (727), she presumably had a sexual relationship of some kind with Colonel John Sartoris - though there is no suggestion of this in Flags in the Dust, where Elnora's mother is named Euphrony.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 19:51
This icon represents "the chillen" Elnora refers to when, describing Jennie Du Pre's 1869 arrival at the Sartoris plantation for her own two children, she says that "Marse John and the chillen" were waiting for her on the veranda (733). In Flags in the Dust (1929), John Sartoris has two daughters in addition to his son Bayard. Faulkner never names these daughters, who remain elusive parts of the Sartoris family. Based on Flags, in 1869 they would have been older than the word "children" suggests, but it's hard to guess who else Elnora could mean.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 19:43
Although the "Cal-lina" house she was living in was burned down by the Yankees (732), the mother of Miss Jenny and John Sartoris presumably survived the Civil War. That, at least, would explain why it is not until 1869 that Miss Jenny (who was living with her) moved from Carolina to Mississippi. She is never given a first name.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 19:37
According to "There Was a Queen," both Miss Jenny's father and her husband were killed during the Civil War, by the men whom she refers to as "them goddamn Yankees" (733).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Thu, 2014-01-09 19:34
One of Elnora's three children, Saddie works as Miss Jenny's caretaker, "tending her as though she were a baby" (728). She sleeps in the big house, "on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre's bed." Genealogically, she is Miss Jenny's great-niece, the illegitimate granddaughter of her brother John, though that relationship is not discussed by any of the characters.
