The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Will Falls calls the two men who work for the U.S. Freedmen's Bureau and try to preserve the newly won rights of emancipated slaves "them two cyarpet-baggers" when he tells the story of how Colonel Sartoris drove them away from the voting place and then shot them in Mrs. Winterbottom's boarding house (23). In Light in August we learn that they are both named Calvin Burden, and are Joanna's grandfather and half-brother.

This is a generic icon, representing the group of emancipated slaves who try to vote in Jefferson in 1872. As Will Falls tells the story, Colonel Sartoris prevents them from doing so by standing in the door and intimidating them.

A "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105).

Apparently the only son of Francis Benbow. He married Julia, with whom he had two children, Horace and Narcissa, and practiced law in Jefferson. He died a few years before the U.S. entered World War I. Narcissa remembers him as "a darkly gallant shape" - "a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness" (172).

The wife of Will Benbow, and mother of Horace and Narcissa. Julia died when Narcissa was seven years old. Narcissa remembers her as "a gentle figure . . . like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread" (172).

The father of Will Benbow, and grandfather of Horace and Narcissa. He brought back a lantana tree "from Barbados in a tophat-box in '71 [i.e. 1871]" (164). When he went to the island, however, or what he did there, is not explained.

At Thanksgiving dinner at the Sartorises', Dr. Peabody mentions Abe as one of the gillies who help the gentlemen who come to fish his pond. ("Gilly" is a Scottish term for a servant who assists a fisherman.) When asked "how many [other black retainers] have you got," Peabody says "six or seven" adults, and an unspecified number of "scrubs," but they are not named (303).

Born into slavery, she served as the cook for the Sartoris family, and as told by Will Falls, helped Colonel John Sartoris escape from the Yankees by having his boots and pistol ready for him when he needed them. She was married to Joby, and so an ancestor of the Strother family that continues to work for the Sartorises in the novel's present.

A slave on the Sartoris plantation, the grandfather of Simon Strother, whose family continues to work for the Sartorises as servants.  In Flags in the Dust, he is referred to as Simon Strother's grandfather. He was married to Louvinia.

Simon Strother's wife and presumably the mother of Elnora (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it is strongly implied that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel does not go into that at all. (In "There Was a Queen," readers learn that Elnora's father was Colonel John Sartoris.)