The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War, Jason Compson III is the heir of one of Jefferson's founding families, but where his grandfather was a plantation owner and Governor of Mississippi, and his father a Confederate General, he himself is an idle lawyer who seems indifferent to the family's economic decline. In Benjy's section readers can find examples of Mr. Compson's attempts to be a good parent to his ill-assorted children, but on the whole he seems to look for refuge from time and loss in both alcoholism and a virulent form of nihilism.

T.P. is the second son of Dilsey and Roskus. As a young man he takes his brother Versh's place as Benjy's caretaker, and helps his father with the Compsons' horses and cow. In 1910 he gets memorably drunk on the champagne - "sassprilluh," T. P. calls it (37) - that has been bought for Caddy's wedding. In 1928 he no longer lives on the Compson property, but still drives the carriage for Mrs. Compson's Sunday afternoon trips to the cemetery.

Dilsey is one of the central characters in The Sound and the Fury. She has worked for the Compson family for many decades, and may once have been their slave, or be descended from people who were enslaved by the family. Her own family inhabits the novel as a kind of foil to the Compsons. Married to Roskus, she is the mother of Versh, Frony, and T.P. and the grandmother of Luster. While technically she is the Compsons' cook, she is also generally responsible for keeping together both their family and her own.