Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2019-01-14 15:14
One of the early settlers of the community that becomes Jefferson, Peabody follows Dr. Habersham, and others of his name practice medicine in Jefferson well into the 20th Century. He collaborates with Compson to subdue the revelers, supplying the laundanum that is added to their whiskey. Peabody shows leadership by joining Compson and Ratcliffe to help them deal with Pettigrew over the lock.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2019-01-14 15:03
Soon after the first whites arrive in Yoknapatawpha come these "new" settlers: "new names and faces too in the settlement now - faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible antecedents other than mammalinity nor past other than the simple years which had scored them" (12).
The "inescapably negro" woman whom Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon marries in Absalom! (168) is apparently somewhat mentally deficient; at least, "her mentality" is mentioned disparagingly (167), and she is described as "existing" in an "automaton-like state" (166). The phrase "inescapably negro" is attributed to Judith; the phrases that Mr. Compson uses to describe her include "coal black and ape-like" (166); "resembling something in a zoo" (169), and "the black gargoyle" (170).
In both "Wash" and again in Absalom!, this girl was born on an unspecified Sunday in 1869, denied by her father and murdered by her great-grandfather on the same day.
Milly Jones appears in both "Wash" and Absalom! as the poor white and illegitimate grandaughter of Wash, who is described in the novel's "Genealogy" as a "hanger-on of Sutpen" (308). She is "eight-years-old" when first mentioned in the short story, and an "infant" when first mentioned in the novel (536, 99). In both texts she is "a fifteen-year-old gal," as Wash puts it in the story, when Sutpen begins a kind of courtship of her, and "already mature [i.e. sexually], after the early way of her kind" (541).
The "daughter" of Wash Jones and the mother of Milly is not named either in the short story "Wash," were she is first mentioned (536), or in Absalom!, where she plays a somewhat more visible role, but she has her own entry as "MELICENT JONES" in the "Genealogy" at the end of the novel (308). In the novel itself, she lives with her father for some years in the "abandoned" fishing camp at Sutpen's (99). The daughter she gives birth to there is "fatherless" (139).
The title character of "Wash" can hardly be called its hero, but his story there and again in Absalom! acquires great moral force before it ends in blood and fire. Described in the novel as a "gaunt gangling man malaria-ridden with pale eyes and a face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty" (69), he survives as a "hanger-on of Sutpen," the richest planter in Yoknapatawpha (308).
In Absalom!, the man who is Rosa Coldfield's "papa" and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .
This character is barely mentioned as "Mrs. Sutpen," Thomas' only wife, in "Wash," but as Ellen Coldfield Sutpen, his second wife in Absalom!, she presents a different image of the plantation mistress than someone like Rosa Millard, who presides over the Sartoris plantation in The Unvanquished. In Absalom! Ellen is the daughter of a merchant. She is described as "small-boned" but also "what is known as fullbodied" (51). According to the storytellers, Sutpen marries her to gain respectability.
