Grandfather Lucius Priest

In this last Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner invents yet another county patriarch along the lines he had laid down with the Sartoris family. Although "only fourteen" when the Civil War began, and so too young to fight, or to be directly involved in slave-owning, like Colonel John Sartoris, Lucius Priest was originally from Carolina (278). Lucius made his way to Mississippi in 1865, where after marrying into the McCaslin family he was already "distantly" related to (278), he eventually "moved in [to town] from McCaslin to become a Jefferson banker" (118) - like Colonel Sartoris' son Bayard. His class origins are not as clearly aristocratic; his father serves in Lee's army as a non-commissioned officer. But in Jefferson the Priest family is clearly as prominent and prestigious as the Sartorises. Lucius and Bayard's lives are linked by automobiles as well as competing banks, and the narrative links their deaths together as well (30). Although as "reivers" his grandson and namesake Lucius, Boon and Ned are all engaged in a kind of rebellion against him, they also all mention him with great respect and admiration. And the frequency with which they mention him makes him a major figure in the narrative even though he only appears in person at the beginning and end of the story.