In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem, and the memorable 'barn burner' in one of Faulkner's best known stories. He first emerges in two of the Unvanquished stories, "The Unvanquished" and "Vendee," and in the same fictional context reappears in "My Grandmother Millard" - all of these are set during the Civil War, but Ab is serving himself rather than the Confederacy as a kind of hanger-on at the Sartoris plantation.
In The Town Flem tells a furniture store owner in Memphis that he had a grandfather, "because everybody had," adding that he never knew his, but "whoever he was he never owned enough furniture for a room" (233). In The Mansion Mink tells the warden of the penitentiary that his and Flem's "grandpaw had two sets of chillen" (114). Those are the only references in the canon to this ur-Snopes, but from them we can infer that he was poor and married twice. From the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group we know that he and his wives had a lot of children.
In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.
In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning).
Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives).
In The Reivers, the unnamed mother of Ned McCaslin is "the natural [i.e. illegitimate] daughter" of Lucius McCaslin and one of his female slaves (31). In Go Down, Moses the slave with whom McCaslin has a daughter is named Eunice, and their daughter is Tomasina; from her descends the Beauchamp side of the McCaslin family. These Beauchamps are a major part of the earlier novel's story, and some of them re-appear in The Reivers.
Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides.
The narrator of The Reivers, Lucius Priest, at one point mentions "your father" to his grandson, the person to whom he is telling the story (25). From that one reference we can't say definitively if this "father" is the narrator's son - or son-in-law. But if we assume that his grandson bears both Lucius' names (i.e. is a Priest), then it follows that he is a son. The reference to this "father" occurs in connection with the period of "the mid-thirties" in Jefferson (25).
The end of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family line in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making their child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter.
In The Reivers Alexander is the youngest of Lucius Priest's three brothers, and still in diapers. His birth just before or during "last winter" is mentioned in the text (44).
