Elnora Strother

Character Key: 
Display Name: 
Elnora Strother
Sort Name: 
Strother, Elnora
Race: 
MixedBlackWhite
Gender: 
Female
Class: 
Free Black
Rank: 
Secondary
Vitality: 
Alive
Family: 
Strother
Family (new): 
Occupation: 
Domestic Service
Specific Job: 
Cook, Maid
Date of Birth: 
Thursday, January 1, 1885 to Tuesday, December 31, 1895
Origin: 
Yoknapatawpha
Biography: 

Elnora is explicitly identified as "Simon [Strother]'s tall yellow daughter," but the narrator of Flags in the Dust also calls her a "mulatto woman," which means that one of her parents is black and the other is white (36) - and it is extremely unlikely in Faulkner's world that it would be her mother who is white. The novel says nothing about a white father, however, nor does it explicitly identify her mother, although the narrator of the later short story, "There Was a Queen," identifies Elnora as the mulatto daughter of Colonel John Sartoris and a unnamed mother. Elnora is also the sister of Caspey and the mother of Isom - though Isom's father is not mentioned at all. In "There Was a Queen," she is Caspey's wife and mother of three children: Isom, Joby, and Saddie. In both fictions she is a servant in the Sartoris household, but here her "endless minor" (20), the constant singing she does while at work in the kitchen, provides a kind of soundtrack for many of the scenes set at the Sartoris mansion.

Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 

digyok:node/character/1398