There is one family in the Indian tribe that lives in Yoknapatawpha which recurs in Faulkner's fiction. As a family, it is mainly defined in terms that can be called political. According to Faulkner's representation of Indian culture, the male head of that family is also "The Man" - the chief of the tribe, who is also "the hereditary owner" of the tribal lands and slaves and can sell or trade these commodities to the white settlers who have already begun arriving in the area ("Red Leaves," 317).
For The Sound and the Fury, his second Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner creates a third aristocratic family: the Compsons. Their social credentials are even more impressive than the Sartorises - according to Quentin Compson, at least, "one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals" (101); although only one General ever appears in the nineteen fictions with Compsons in them, he outranks all the Colonels and Majors in the other stories.
In the context of Faulkner's career, the Benbows are one of Yoknapatawpha's very 'first families,' along with the Snopeses and the Sartorises. In 1927 or 1928, when he put aside the "Father Abraham" manuscript about the rise of the Snopeses in the New South to write Flags in the Dust about the displacement of the county's old aristocracy, he divided the novel's focus between young Bayard Sartoris and Horace Benbow, descended respectively from planters and lawyers.
In Faulkner's last Yoknapatawpha fiction, "Old Thomas Sutpen" is again the only member of the family who appears, and again his appearance is in connection with Major de Spain's hunting camp, but Lucius Priest's narrative includes elliptical references to "Sutpen's vast kingly dream which in the end had destroyed not only itself but Sutpen too" (20) and to "Sutpen's doomed baronial dream" (72) - phrases in which the rest of his family lurks, at least for readers of Absalom, Absalom!.
The name "Sutpen" appears in the novel's list of the "new names" that arrive in Yoknapatawpha during the early life of the settlement (8), and "a man named Sutpen," no first name, is particularized a bit more fully when the novel mentions how he acquires a tract of land where he seems "bent on establishing" an "ambitious and gradiose" plantation (30). But no other member of his several families appears or is mentioned.
"Sutpen" appears on the list of Jason Compson III's legal clients, among other of "the oldest names in the county" (330). Readers of Absalom! know that Jason's father, who is also a lawyer, counted Thomas and Judith Sutpen as well as Thomas' unacknowledged grandson Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon among his friends and clients, but no individual Sutpens are particularized in the "Appendix."
"Old Thomas Sutpen" is mentioned twice in the novel in a pair of phrases, both times as the man from whom De Spain acquires the hunting camp (181, 241). There is no mention at all of Sutpen's family.
Thomas Sutpen is first evoked in the novel as the unnamed "damn feller" who replaces John Sartoris in command of the regiment that Jefferson sent to the Civil War (52), and then named when John's son and wife, Bayard and Drusilla, compare the two colonels and their ambitions (221-23). But Sutpen's family only appears briefly, and negatively, when readers learn that Sutpen "lost everything in the War," including "all hope of descendants" after "his son killed his daughter's fiance" (222). This phrasing erases race from the story completely.
In Absalom! Faulkner undertakes his most ambitious imaginative reconstruction of the rise and fall of the Old South, along with the vexed legacy that history bequeaths to the modern South. He organizes that larger story around the history of the Sutpens across six generations - especially the two generations who go through the experience of the Civil War.
When the Sutpen family appears in the short story "Wash," there is nothing to distinguish them from other slave-owning plantation aristocrats. Sutpen himself seems godlike to Wash as he "gallops about the plantation" on his fine "black stallion" (538). His one unnamed son is "killed in action" during the Civil War, in "the same winter in which his wife had died" in Yoknapatawpha (538-39).
