The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Narcissa's husband and Miss Jenny's great-great-nephew, "the last Bayard" Sartoris (727) fought "in France" during World War I (735) and was "killed in an airplane" (736) at age twenty-six. But that was after he returned home from the War; readers of Flags in the Dust know it was an experimental airplane that he tried to fly at a field near the Wright brothers' home in Ohio.

Although Temple Drake is as central to Sanctuary as Horace Benbow, she is a much harder character to summarize. She is a 17-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the daughter of a judge trying on the contemporary role of flapper. Benbow Sartoris refers to her as Gowan Stevens' "jelly" (a slang term for a pretty girl, 25), but in fact she dates many young men, from both the college and the town.

John Sartoris' son Bayard had one son, also named John. He is Miss Jenny's great-nephew, and the father of the twins Bayard and John (Johnny) Sartoris.

Born at the end of Flags in the Dust on the same day his father is killed in a plane crash, the 10-year-old son of Bayard and Narcissa is the last of the Sartorises. He was named Benbow by his mother as a tribute to her family ("Bory," her nickname for him, similarly gestures toward "Horry," her nickname in the earlier novel for her brother Horace).

Colonel John Sartoris' "son Bayard" is also referred to in the story as "old Bayard" (727) and as "Colonel Sartoris" (739). In his case, "Colonel" is a purely formal title, since he is the one of the two Sartoris males who never served in an army. "Old Bayard" hearkens back to his appearance as a major character in Flags in the Dust. He is the narrator of The Unvanquished, which is organized around his growth from adolescence to manhood.

John Sartoris is still called "Marse John" by Elnora, decades after slavery was abolished and he himself was killed (732-33). Miss Jenny's brother, he was the first Sartoris to move to Mississippi, where he built the plantation on which the story takes place. He is also Elnora's (unacknowledged) father, which means that he is the ancestor, either by blood or by marriage, of all the major characters in the story. In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group he is depicted as one of the founders of Yoknapatawpha County, and a legendary figure in its history.

Although the narrative includes Elnora in its inventory of the "Negroes" who live at the Sartoris place (728), she is as much "white" as she is "black," and belongs to both the families that have lived on the plantation since it was built in the 1830s. On her mother's side she is a Strother, a family that served the Sartorises for many generations, first as slaves and then as servants. Like those Negro ancestors, Elnora lives in a cabin behind the big house.

Barefoot, "shambling," with "matted and foul" hair (10) and a "rapt empty gaze" (113), Tommy helps Lee make bootleg whiskey and, when Lee is not watching, drinks it too. He has been a familiar figure "for fifteen years about the countryside" (113), and occasionally in town, but no one in Yoknapatawpha knows his last name. His behavior disconcerts both Horace and Temple. Lee and Ruby both call him a "feeb" (9, 128). He is feeble-minded but kind-hearted. After Gowan deserts Temple, Tommy loses his life trying to protect her from Popeye.

With eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm," "blind and deaf" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, the novel gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place.