In "Spotted Horses" the oldest child of the Armstids is named Ina May. She is "about twelve" (178), and takes care of her younger siblings while her mother is shuttling back and forth to Mrs. Littlejohn's. According to Mrs. Armstid "Ina May bars the door" and keeps "the axe in bed with her" while her mother is away (179). When The Hamlet retells this story the Armstids' twelve-year-old daughter is not named, but she plays the same offstage role, guarding over the "littlest ones" with an axe through the nights her mother is away (347).
The wife of the farmer named Armstid appears or is mentioned in seven texts; she is unnamed in five of them, but her name is Lula in As I Lay Dying, the first one, and Martha in Light in August. That is not the only inconsistency in her character. In both these novels she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind to her husband; in "Spotted Horses," however, she is extremely self-effacing, submitting without complaint to her husband's abusive behavior.
Henry Armstid, a subsistence farmer who lives in Frenchman's Bend, appears in two very different ways in seven different fictions. In As I Lay Dying, both the chapter he himself narrates and his actions reveal him to be generous, reliable and sane. In Light in August he displays the same traits as he helps Lena Grove on her journey.
In The Mansion, Mr. Holland is the President of the Bank of Jefferson, the rival of the bank founded by Bayard Sartoris. Holland creates a scholarship in honor of his "only son," who died fighting in World War II (361).
In "Tomorrow," Mr. Holland is the foreman of the jury that cannot reach a verdict in the Bookwright murder trial; Chick recognizes him as the man arguing in exasperation with Mr. Fentry.
In "Smoke," Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15), but have different temperaments. Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, tries to mediate between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.
In "Smoke," Cornelia Holland is the daughter and only child of Mr. Mardis. She marries Anselm Holland (Senior). She bears him twin sons - Anselm (Junior) and Virginius - of whom the former "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). Her father's property is held in her name after his death. She dies of unspecified causes when her sons are still children, though the narrator and others believe "her life had been worn out by the crass violence of [her husband,] an underbred outlander" (4).
In "Smoke" Anselm Junior is one of the twin sons of Anselm Holland. He seems to have inherited his father's violent misanthropy along with his name, although he "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). He is the first of the twins to break with their father, moving "back into the hills" of Yoknapatawpha (5). He is "a dark, silent, aquiline-faced man" whom "both neighbors and strangers let severely alone" (6).
In "Smoke," the older Anselm Holland is what the people of Yoknapatawpha consider an "outlander" (4) - i.e. someone who was not only born outside the county, but who remains estranged from the community no matter how long he or she lives there. Of an unremittingly violent, misanthropic, and crass nature, he alienates his sons, desecrates the graves in the Mardis Cemetery, and allows his sons’ rightful inheritance of farm and house to go to ruin for spite.
In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet "Old Man Anse Holland" (118, 33) is the landowner from whom "Pap" (in the short story) and Ab Snopes (in the novel) rent the farm they work on as a tenant farmer. In the novel, Ratliff lives on another tenant farm that Holland owns, "about a mile away" (33) - a distance that suggests that Holland is a large landowner, like the Sartorises or the McCaslins.
