In Flags in the Dust Eustace Graham is "a young lawyer" who doesn't realize Young Bayard is drunk when he tries to introduce Sartoris to a fellow veteran named Gratton (125). He plays a much larger role in Sanctuary as the District Attorney who prosecutes Lee Goodwin. According to Horace, he is a "damn little squirt" (185) who probably pressured the hotel into turning Ruby out. According to the narrator, he has "a club foot, which had probably elected him to the office he now held" (261).
In Flags in the Dust the owner of the restaurant on the Square refers to "a man like Debs" as a better candidate for President than Woodrow Wilson (122); in The Mansion, at the other end of Faulkner's career, "Eugene Debs" is among the people on the list provided by Charles Mallison of "everybody they called communists now" (237). The historical Eugene V. Debs founded the International Workers of the World (IWW), and was the Socialist Party of America's candidate for President in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920.
The man the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" calls "Grandpap" is actually his father's grandfather. Sounding like the boy he is, the narrator says he is "old, so old you just wouldn't believe it" (111). In his dotage all he talks about is "the Confederate war," though the narrative does not say how he was involved in the Civil War (112). (The narrator's mother's grandfather also served in the Civil War, but his last name wouldn't have been Grier.)
In "Shall Not Perish," when Mrs. Grier consoles Major de Spain for the loss of his son in the early days of World War Two, she mentions her own grandfather who fought in the Civil War, adding that "I reckon his mother didn't know why [he had to enlist] either, but I reckon he did" (109).
Mrs. Grier mentions this character in "Shall Not Perish" when she is consoling Major de Spain for the loss of his son: "my grandfather was in that old one there too" (109), meaning the Civil War.
Maw Grier's brother Marsh fought and was wounded in World War I. For Mrs. Grier in "Two Soldiers," her brother's decision to enlist in 1917 gives her a way to appreciate why in 1941 her oldest son Pete has "got to go" to the another war. For Mr. Grier, however, Marsh's "actual wound on the battlefields of France" means the family has already contributed "enough" to U.S. war efforts (85). Mrs. Grier mentions her brother again in "Shall Not Perish."
The Grier family appears in three stories from the early 1940s, but only the last of them - "Shall Not Perish" (1943) - mentions first generations of Griers in Yoknapatawpha. They first farmed the land that seems to have been passed from one generation to the next.
Mrs. Res Grier mentions her mother in both "Two Soldiers" and "Shall Not Perish." Like her mother, she says, whose son was wounded in France in the first World War, she cannot understand why the sons of mothers (including her own Pete) have to fight in wars.
Unlike the upper-class boy narrators of Faulkner's previous fictions, the unnamed eight-year-old who narrates the three 'Grier' stories in the early 1940s - "Two Soldiers," "Shingles for the Lord" and "Shall Not Perish" - narrates from within the class of impoverished farmers who subsist on the poor land around Frenchman's Bend. His concerns are closely tied to his family - mother, father and brother Pete - but in the first and last of the stories Faulkner also uses him to represent his caste in a new context, the second World War.
In "Two Soldiers" Pete Grier, the oldest of the two Grier sons, enlists in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "I got to go," he says; "I jest ain't going to put up with no folks treating the United States that way" (83). Before December 7, 1941, he worked on his family's farm in Frenchman's Bend. The "ten acres" of land he himself owns was given to him by his father "when he graduated from the Consolidated" (82). According to his younger brother, who idolizes him, Pete was a very hard worker: "He never got behind like Pap, let alone stayed behind" (82).
