The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A son of Virginius MacCallum, Sr., and the twin brother of Raphael "Rafe" MacCallum. Like his brothers, he is named after a prominent Confederate officer - J.E.B. Stuart, who also appears in the novel. He appears as Stuart McCallum in "The Tall Men" (142).

The eldest of Virginius MacCallum's sons, Jackson is described as "a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus" (337). His forehead is "broad" and "high," his expression "at once dreamy and intense" (337). He is named for the Confederate general, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Much to his father's disgust, he is attempting to transform hunting by interbreeding a fox and a hound.

One of the three black men (the others are Richard, and an unnamed "half-grown negro boy") who live with the MacCallums, presumably as servants or tenant farmers, or he may be the "negro who assists" Henry make moonshine whiskey (335).

This is the named man among the "two negro men" and the boy in the MacCallum kitchen (336). Mandy calls him "Richud" (337). Buddy calls him "Dick" (338). So it seems likely that his full name is Richard, though neither that nor his role in the household or on the family's land is spelled out.

Mandy is the only woman who lives at the MacCallum place. She cooks for the white family, although the narrator describes Henry MacCallum as "a better cook now than Mandy" (335). Her size and shape are indicated by the narrator's description of the way her "homely calico expanse" fills the doorway between the house and the kitchen (336).

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum, Lee is the "least talkative of them all"; his face is "a dark, saturnine mask" and his eyes are "black and restless," with "something wild and sad" lurking in them" (334). Like most of the MacCallums, he is named for a prominent Confederate - Robert E. Lee.

A yeoman farmer. During the Civil War Virginius walked from Mississippi to Virginia to fight with Lee's army, then returned to Yoknapatawpha to father six sons. As a Southerner, he is very 'unreconstructed,' refusing to recognize his son Buddy's World War I service in a "Yankee" army (342).

Henry is the second of Virginius MacCallum's six sons. He is "squat" and "slightly tubby," with "something domestic, womanish" about him (335). He spends "most of the time" inside: he superintends the kitchen, is "a better cook" than the black woman who is the family's official cook, and is locally famous for the quality of his homemade whiskey (335). Given his brothers' names - Lee, Jackson, Stuart and Raphael Semmes all pay homage to prominent Confederates - it's possible that Henry is named after Henry Clay, the antebellum Kentucky Senator.

The youngest of Virginius MacCallum's sons, Buddy served with valor in World War I, earning a medal that he never takes out at home, because his father refuses to acknowledge that he fought in a "Yankee" army (342). He is an avid hunter. Buddy is the MacCallum whom the rest of the family relies on to marry someday and perpetuate the name. He is the only MacCallum brother not named after a Confederate hero: his given name is the same as his father's, Virginius. And the spelling of his last name changes to McCallum in the fictions that Faulkner published after 1940.

Belle Mitchell's younger sister, who comes to Jefferson while Belle is away getting a divorce, to see what Horace Benbow is like; during the week she spends in town she and Horace have an affair. By the time she gets to Jefferson she has had a wide experience, both of the world (having lived in Hawaii, Australia and India, among other unnamed "random points half the world apart," 322) and of men (having been married a least twice and lived with at least one other man).