Gavin again enacts his role as detective and crusader, but in this story it's possible to read his 'heroism' ironically. His efforts to help Monk do not save him, and may even have contributed to his death.
Gavin is again the district attorney, but despite his job he remains detached from the novel's story of crime and punishment. Instead he is introduced late in the narrative to provide a racial explanation for the murderer's behavior. Here he is linked directly to a family history, and through it, implicitly, to a Southern history. The earliest Stevens in Yoknapatawpha owned slaves before the Civil War and his grandfather hated Yankee carpetbaggers during Reconstruction.
In his second appearance, Gavin Stevens is the "county attorney" rather than the "district" one, a change that associates him with the whole of Yoknapatawpha, and his place in this story is that of the protagonist, even the hero, who uses his interpretive skills to solve a murder and free an innocent man. The role of detective-and-knight-errant is one he will play again in five more stories, but the way Gavin performs it is consistently defined outside his identity as the first-born member of an upper class family.
The last part of "Hair" marks the first appearance in Faulkner's fiction of Gavin Stevens, who is identified as the Harvard-educated district attorney and defined by his generosity and curiosity but not by his place in a family.
The Stevenses and the Benbows (and even the Sartorises) intersect in this novel, when Gowan Stevens courts Narcissa Benbow, the widow of Bayard Sartoris. Gowan has recently graduated from the University of Virginia, where the Sartoris twins also matriculated, but his repeated claims that at college he learned to "drink like a gentleman" provide Faulkner with a way to debunk the idea of a chivalrous aristocracy - at least as represented by Gowan. Gowan's mother is mentioned, but she and her son never appear together in the narrative.
Faulkner's first Stevens appears in this 1930 short story, as "Judge Stevens," though he is also one of the two mayors of Jefferson mentioned in the story; the other is a Sartoris, which establishes the social status of the Stevens family from the start. The fact that he is 80 years old makes it possible that this "Stevens" is also the one who first came to Yoknapatawpha, but we are assuming he is that man's son.
This character represents the "ancestors" of Gavin Stevens (444). All the novel says about them is that they "owned slaves" in Jefferson (444), but the later short story "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939) identifies a "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.
The Stevenses are one of the older Yoknapatawpha families, but there is confusion about its earlier members. The first appearance of a Stevens is in "A Rose for Emily"; he is the eighty-year-old mayor of Jefferson referred to as "Judge Stevens" (122). According to Brooks, Dasher and Kirk, three of the scholars who create charts or indices of Faulkner's characters, this man is the same Judge Stevens who is Gavin's father in half a dozen other fictions.
Like her mother, the 20-year-old daughter of "Mrs. Harriss" never gets a first name in "Knight's Gambit," the only text in which she has a significant presence. In other respects too she takes after her mother: "looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain" (190–91).
