The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

One of Elnora's three children, Saddie works as Miss Jenny's caretaker, "tending her as though she were a baby" (728). She sleeps in the big house, "on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre's bed." Genealogically, she is Miss Jenny's great-niece, the illegitimate granddaughter of her brother John, though that relationship is not discussed by any of the characters.

Elnora's son Isom is one of her two children who continue the family pattern of service to the Sartorises. His Strother ancestors were slaves who came from Carolina to Mississippi with the first John Sartoris (who is also one of Isom's grandfathers). Isom apparently still lives with his mother in the cabin those ancestors occupied, and "tends the grounds" of the Sartoris estate (728).

The father of Miss Jenny and Colonel John was apparently a great planter in one of the Carolinas. He was killed fighting in the Civil War.

Born at the end of Flags in the Dust on the same day that his father, (Young) Bayard, dies, ten-year-old Benbow is the last of the Sartorises. Although Miss Jenny persists in calling him "Johnny" in keeping with Sartoris family tradition (728), his mother Narcissa gave him her family name instead. Her nickname for him, "Bory," recalls her nickname in Flags in the Dust for her brother Horace, i.e. "Horry." Unlike his paternal ancestors, he remains a minor figure in the Yoknapatawpha story.

This John Sartoris is the great-grandson of Colonel John, and the twin brother of Young Bayard. His great aunt Miss Jenny thinks of him as "Johnny" (728). The twins were both serving in the British air force when John was shot down over France in 1918.

A "large woman in her thirties" (738), Narcissa Sartoris, nee Benbow, is descended from one of the leading Yoknapatawpha families. From a sociological perspective, there is no basis for Elnora to call her "trash" (734). On her first direct appearance in the story she appears (perhaps just to Miss Jenny) as displaying "something of that heroic quality of statuary" (738).

The "Queen" of this story, Virginia Du Pre nee Sartoris is a force to be reckoned with for over ninety years. When Elnora talks about "Her," her tone of voice capitalizes the pronoun (732). "The last of the Carolina family" (728), whose father and husband were killed during the Civil War, in 1869 she made her own way across the defeated South carrying panes of colored glass and flower cuttings from the family's ancestral home like sacred relics.

Joby is Elnora's son and the (presumably) older brother of Isom and Saddie. The only information we have about him is that he has "gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street" (727). He plays no role in the plot of the story. (There is another "Joby" among the slaves and then servants on the Sartoris plantation, but that one is this one's great-grandfather. He is a character in The Unvanquished.)

Caspey is only mentioned in the story, when he is identified as "Elnora's husband" (727), although in Flags in the Dust, he is Elnora's brother. In that novel he returns from in France and World War I with a lot of anger against the place he is supposed to occupy in the region's Jim Crow system, though after a violent reprimand from (Old) Bayard Sartoris, he resumes his role as a loyal servant. In this story he is serving a sentence in the penitentiary for robbery or burglary, but no further details of his life are provided.

Identified as "Elnora's mother's husband" (727) to reinforce the point that John Sartoris rather than Simon was Elnora's biological father, he nonetheless played the part of her father in the life of the family, and so well that it is "possible," though not "probable," that no one ever knew she wasn't his child. Simon plays a fairly large, and essentially comic part in Flags in the Dust, where he ends up "in the graveyard" after being found murdered in the cabin of a much younger woman.