According to the narrator of Light in August (1932), the Stevens family is "old in Jefferson." In Intruder in the Dust (1948), Chick Mallison, whose mother is a Stevens, sees the landscape of Yoknapatawpha as "the dirt, the earth which had bred his bones and those of his fathers for six generations." Actually, if we count from the first Stevens to be born in Mississippi, Chick belongs to the fourth or at most the fifth generation, but in the short story "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939) Faulkner revises his usual account of Yoknapatawpha's settlement to include a Stevens alo
