The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In this novel Caspey is the son of Simon Strother and the brother of Elnora. He served in a non-combatant role with the U.S. Army in France during World War I. When he returned home to Jefferson, he brought with him some wildly exaggerated tales about his military service, and a set of new ideas about racial equality which made his family very nervous and drove Old Bayard to hit him in the head with a stick of stove wood. After that he seems to accept his place as a servant of the Sartorises.

Elnora's young son, Isom is described as "a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound" (20). He is responsible for a number of chores around the Sartoris household, but most enjoys wearing Caspey's military uniform and taking the wheel of Bayard's car. There is no hint of how, if at all, he is being educated.

Elnora is explicitly identified as "Simon [Strother]'s tall yellow daughter," but the narrator of Flags in the Dust also calls her a "mulatto woman," which means that one of her parents is black and the other is white (36) - and it is extremely unlikely in Faulkner's world that it would be her mother who is white. The novel says nothing about a white father, however, nor does it explicitly identify her mother, although the narrator of the later short story, "There Was a Queen," identifies Elnora as the mulatto daughter of Colonel John Sartoris and a unnamed mother.

During the Civil War, Will Falls served with Colonel John Sartoris' irregular outfit. The stories he tells Old Bayard about that past serve to fetch "the spirit of the dead man" into the novel's post World War I present (3), and the old Choctaw salve with which he successfully treats Bayard's wen reinforces the role he plays as a connection to the old South. He lives frugally in the county poor farm, regularly walks the three miles into town, and his "faded overalls" give off a "clean dusty smell" (3).

The last male descendant of the aristocratic Benbow family, Horace served as a noncombatant with the YMCA during World War I. Like his father he is a lawyer. His passion for glass blowing identifies him as an artist-figure, albeit a hapless one.  Like Quentin Compson, he is characterized by his idealism and his ineffectuality, and he is often depicted at the mercy of women: his sister Narcissa, his mistress and eventual wife Belle, and even Belle's sister, Joan, with whom he has a very brief affair.

Sister of Horace Benbow, with whom she seems to have an unusually close relationship, and second wife of (Young) Bayard Sartoris, whom she married in 1919 and with whom her relationship is always strained. The most eligible upper-class woman in Jefferson, she is courted openly by Dr. Alford, and clandestinely by Bryon Snopes, whose anonymous love letters she keeps in her bedroom until Byron steals them. ("There Was a Queen" tells the story of how she recovered these letters.) On June 5, 1920, the same day of her husband's death, she gave birth to a son.

Harry Mitchell's wife and Horace Benbow's lover at the start the novel, she is Mrs. Benbow at the end. With Harry she has a daughter, Little Belle. Her hair is described as a "rich bloody auburn" (199), and her personality in equally vivid if pejorative terms: "her eyes are like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent" (182).

The twin brother of Bayard Sartoris, III ("Young Bayard"), son of John and Lucy Cranston Sartoris, and grandson of "Old" Bayard. He attended the University of Virginia and Princeton University before joining the Royal Air Force as an aviator in World War I. He was shot down and killed behind enemy lines in July 1918. In a sense he haunts the text. He is remembered very fondly by many of the novel's characters, and with a great deal of survivor guilt by his brother.

Along with Horace Benbow, "Young" Bayard Sartoris is the novel's central character. The twin brother of John Sartoris, the son of John and Lucy Cranston Sartoris, and the grandson of "Old" Bayard. He attended the University of Virginia and then taught flying in Memphis, where he met and married Caroline White. During World War I he joined the Royal Air Force and served in Europe, where his brother was shot down and killed. As a member of the 'Lost Generation,' he suffers from both the horrors of that war and survivor guilt about his brother's loss.

The younger sister of Colonel John Sartoris, Jenny married a man named Du Pre, who was killed in the Civil War. In 1869 she made her own way from Carolina to Mississippi to live with her brother's family, bringing with her "a straw-filled hamper" containing pieces of colored glass from the family's ancestral mansion (10) and tales of Sartoris daring. Indomitable and strong-willed, she comes to run the Sartoris household and outlives all of the Sartoris men except for Benbow Sartoris, her great-great-grandnephew.