The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

From these "Confederate pickets close to the enemy's front" it is learned that Pomp has been trying to get behind Yankee lines to find his missing master, Gail Hightower I, whom he believes is a prisoner of war (476).

According to the narrator, while at the end of the Civil War the first Gail Hightower "looked forward and made what he could of defeat," "the other men" who fought for the Confederacy "returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead" (474).

These military physicians tend soldiers wounded in battle during the Civil War. They are often assisted by Reverend Hightower's father, who learns from them to practice medicine.

Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

One story that is told about the first Gail Hightower concerns the time he invaded an "al fresco church revival" and "turned it into a week of amateur horse racing" while a "dwindling congregation" listened to the "gaunt, fanaticfaced country preachers" (472) condemn him.

Pomp (presumably short for 'Pompey') is Cinthy's husband and the first Gail Hightower's slave. Though called "boy," he is older than his master, and completely bald (471). He follows his master to war and refuses to believe that he could have been killed in the cavalry raid in Jefferson. Pomp himself is reportedly killed after attacking "a Yankee officer with a shovel" in an attempt to see or perhaps rescue "Marse Gail" (476-77).

Before the Civil War Cinthy (like her husband Pomp) was a slave who belonged to the elder Gail Hightower. She cooked for him, and "raised [his son] from babyhood" (470). After both her husband and her master are killed during the War, she rejects the idea that she is now "free" (477) and moves back to the Hightower home to cook for that son and his family.

Reverend Hightower's father returns home from the Civil War in a wagon; it stops in front of his house, and these "two men lift him down and carry him into the house" and to his bed (468).

Hightower's mother is the daughter of a genteel church-going couple without substantial means. By the time she has her first and only child, she has been an invalid for almost twenty years, possibly because she was malnourished during the Civil War, when she was left to fend for herself, without any slaves.

The son of one Gail Hightower and the father of another, this man is never given a first name. A "man of spartan sobriety" (472), in the years before the Civil War he opposes slavery and refuses to be served by his father's slaves. Despite his sentiments, which he learns to call "abolitionist" when that word "percolates down from the North" (472), he served the Confederacy during the Civil War as a minister, "praying and preaching to troops on Sunday mornings" (473).