In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).
The "French sugar planter" (199) who in Absalom! becomes Sutpen's "first father-in-law" (268) after Sutpen saves him and his plantation from a slave rebellion is not described in any detail. Since his daughter is described as "Haiti-born" (268), it seems likely that he himself is originally from France. He is apparently a widower, since he tells Sutpen that his daughter's "mother had been a Spanish woman" (283).
Sutpen's daughter Judith first appears in the prequel to Absalom!, the short story "Wash"; though her character is barely sketched, her actions often anticipate her story in the novel. As "Miss Judith" she lives alone in the big house on the Sutpen plantation during much of the Civil War, after the deaths of her mother and brother and while her father is away fighting (541).
In two of the three texts in which this son of Thomas Sutpen is mentioned, he is not named and his story is relatively uncomplicated. In "Wash," the prequel to Absalom!, he was "killed in action" during the Civil War (538). In The Unvanquished, published soon after Absalom!, the narrator writes that Sutpen's "son killed his daughter's fiance on the eve of the wedding and vanished" (222). In Absalom! itself, however, he is given the name Henry, and his action provides the narrative with the mystery that haunts it from beginning to end.
In Absalom! Clytemnestra (Clytie) is the daughter of Thomas Sutpen and one of the two enslaved women he brings with him to Yoknapatawpha. She is first mentioned by Rosa, as the "negro girl" with a "Sutpen face" beside Judith Sutpen, Clytie's half-sister (22); later Rosa refers to her "Sutpen coffee-colored face" (109). Sutpen "named [Clytemnestra] himself," after a legendary Greek queen, though Mr. Compson "likes to believe" that Sutpen "intended to name her Cassandra," after another figure from Greek tragedy (48).
While almost nothing is certain in Absalom, Absalom!, it is particularly difficult to know how to identify this character. When she first appears in the narrative she is first called "the other woman" (other than Judith, that is) whose photograph Charles Bon is carrying when he is killed (71). Mr. Compson calls her "the octoroon mistress" (75), Bon's "eighth part negro mistress" (80), and "a hereditary negro concubine" (168). Shreve (who as a non-Southerner is unfamiliar with the caste term "white trash," 147) refers to her as "the octoroon" (249, 286).
In Absalom!, the "little boy" in the picture that is found on Charles Bon's body (75) is Bon's "sixteenth part negro son" (80); his grandiloquent name is Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon. When Judith and Clytemnestra bring him from New Orleans to Sutpen's Hundred after his mother dies, Judith tells him to "Call me Aunt Judith" (169), perhaps without realizing that he is in fact her half-nephew and her father's grandson.
Charles Bon is a major character in Absalom!, although none of the novel's four main narrators ever saw him. Faulkner's first account of him appears in "Evangeline," a story he tried unsuccessfully to sell in mid-1931; there 'Charles Bon' is an orphan from New Orleans who marries Judith Sutpen and is killed by Judith's brother Henry at the end of the Civil War, apparently because Henry discovers he is already married to a woman with "negro blood." The story contains no hint that he is either Thomas Sutpen's son or part Negro.
In Absalom! the first wife of Thomas Sutpen and the mother of Charles Bon is not given a name until the "Genealogy" that appears after the narrative proper, where she is identified as "Eulalia Bon" (307). She is the "Haiti-born" daughter of a French sugar planter (268). When she first appears in the narrative, it is as "a shadow that almost emerged for a moment and then faded again" (199) - the elusiveness of this is entirely appropriate.
After the young Thomas Sutpen is turned away from the front door of the Tidewater plantation house in Absalom!, he suddenly recognizes his responsibility to "all the men and women that had died to make him" and "all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead" (178).
