Only one member of the Strothers family appears in this novel, which returns to the Sartoris plantation a decade after the events of Flags in the Dust. Isom continues to serve the white family, now as a chauffeur.
Although this story is set in France and focused on the experience of Johnny Sartoris as a World War I aviator, two members of the Strothers family are mentioned in Johnny's letter home: Elnora, who knitted him a pair of socks, and her son Isom.
In this short story, a kind of coda to the earlier novels Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary, Faulkner illuminates and complicates his representation of the Strother family. Six of them are mentioned by name: Simon, Elnora, Caspey, Isom, Joby, and Saddie. These last two, both like Isom children of Elnora, are new additions to the family tree.
This is the first of eight stories Faulkner wrote about the Sartoris family during and just after the Civil War; seven of these were revised and republished in The Unvanquished. All are narrated by Bayard Sartoris, who spends the war at home with his Granny and the family of slaves that his father brought with him from Carolina some years earlier.
In this story Louvinia, talking to Ringo, calls Joby "your pappy" (18), which would make Louvinia his mother and Loosh his brother, but this is the only suggestion of Ringo's specific place on the family tree, and "pappy" here seems more like a generic term (like mammy) than a biological fact (like father). There is no other indication in this story or any of the other Unvanquished stories that Ringo is Joby's son.
Four generations of the Strothers family appear or are mentioned in this first Yoknapatawpha fiction, though there should be five: Simon is identified as Joby's grandson, but the novel never mentions Simon's parents - which is why that generation is represented in absentia on the genealogical chart. The other genealogical mystery involves Elnora. When she appears in the novel's first chapter, the narrator describes her as "a tall mulatto woman" (9), a phrase that explicitly presumes that one of her parents is white.
The two oldest members of this family - Joby and Louvinia - came from Carolina to Mississippi as slaves of John Sartoris. With two exceptions, they and their descendants serve the Sartorises loyally, as slaves before the Civil War and servants afterward, for five generations and in 3 novels and 9 short stories. Simon Strothers appears in the first chapter of the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust.
"A Justice" takes place when Quentin Compson is twelve. Roskus drives the carriage that takes him, Grandfather, Caddy and Jason on their weekly drives to the white family's farm four miles from their house. Quentin sits "in front with Roskus," and on the way "Grandfather and Roskus would talk," but readers aren't given access to what Roskus says, or what Quentin thinks about him (360). When the carriage leaves the farm, the narrative notes that "the horses move at once," but makes no mention of the man who is presumably still driving them (360).
The "Luster" who accompanies Quentin and his father as a groom on the hunting expedition that takes them to the Sutpen family graveyard has to be a member of the Gibson family. His character resembles the "Luster" whom Faulkner created earlier in The Sound and the Fury (1929). But that "Luster" wasn't born until a few years after Quentin dies, a detail that Faulkner seems to have forgotten. There would have been no inconsistency if one of Luster's uncles - Versh or T.P.
When in 1945 Faulkner decided to write what he called a "new section" for The Sound and the Fury - what is now published as "Appendix Compsons: 1699-1945" - he added three generations of ancestors to the Compson family tree. The Gibson family we see in this text still goes back no further than Dilsey, but it now includes an unnamed husband for Frony (though this does not clear up the question about Luster's father), and gives us a look at the Gibsons beyond Yoknapatawpha: after first moving to St.
