In Flags in the Dust Caspey is the son of Simon Strother and the brother of Elnora. He is also one of the five men in the novel who are returning from France after the end of World War I. Caspey served in a non-combatant role with the U.S. Army over there; when he returned home to Jefferson, he brought with him some wildly exaggerated tales about his military service, and a set of new ideas about racial equality which made his family very nervous and drove Old Bayard to knock him down with a stick of stove wood.
Philadelphy - almost certainly a corruption of "Philadelphia," the name she has in "My Grandmother Millard" (668) - is, like her husband Loosh, a slave on the Sartoris plantation. She is what is sometimes called a 'house slave,' i.e. one of the slaves who work inside the white family's mansion rather than in the cotton fields. We see her serving as a maid in "My Grandmother Millard," which Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after The Unvanquished was published.
Isom is Elnora's only child in Flags in the Dust, "a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound" (20). He is responsible for a number of chores around the Sartoris household, but most enjoys wearing Caspey's military uniform and taking the wheel of Bayard's car. There is no hint of how, if at all, he is being educated. He is at the wheel of a car again ten years later in Sanctuary, where he is "the negro driver" who works for Narcissa Sartoris (110) - and the only member of the Strother family who is included in the novel.
One of Elnora's three children in the short story "There Was a Queen," Saddie works as Miss Jenny's caretaker, "tending her as though she were a baby" (728). "Saddie" may be a corruption of 'Saturday.' She sleeps in the big house, "on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre's bed" (728). Genealogically, she is Miss Jenny's great-niece, the illegitimate granddaughter of her brother John, though that relationship is not discussed by any of the characters. (In the earlier novel Flags in the Dust, Elnora has only one child - Isom.)
This Joby is Elnora's son and the (presumably) older brother of Isom and Saddie. The only information we have about him is that he has "gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street" (727). He plays no role in the plot of the story. (There is another Joby in the Strother family - during the Civil War he is a slave and afterwards a servant of the Sartorises - but he is the great-grandfather of this Joby. This Joby only appears in "There Was a Queen.")
The very first time Elnora appears in the very first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, she is described as "a tall mulatto woman" (9). Although that term is no longer in use, Faulkner's contemporaries knew it meant a person with one white and one black parent.
Euphrony is briefly mentioned in Flags in the Dust as Simon's dead wife, which presumably also makes her the mother of Elnora and Caspey (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it seems to follow that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel makes no attempt to explore that issue. On the other hand, in "There Was a Queen" Elnora's mother is not named, but her (white) father is identified as Colonel John Sartoris. Again, however, no more is said about that.
Ringo - short for Marengo, the name of Napoleon's horse - was born into slavery as a member of the black family that has served the Sartorises for several generations. He appears in all the stories that Bayard Sartoris narrates, as a major character in the seven that were collected in The Unvanquished and a somewhat reduced one in the later "My Grandmother Millard." Even as a slave he occupies an intimate place in the Sartoris family, as both Bayard's personal servant and his friend.
Loosh - or Lucius, as he's called in "My Grandmother Millard" and, presumably, as he was actually named - appears or is mentioned in four of the Unvanquished stories as well as "My Grandmother." Biologically, he is the son of Joby and Louvinia, the husband of Philadelphy, and the uncle of Ringo. Thematically, he is the only slave on the Sartoris plantation (and one of the few in the Yoknapatawpha fictions) who openly rebels against his enslavement.
Simon first appears, in Flags in the Dust, as the elderly father of Elnora and Caspey and the coachman and butler at the Sartoris place where he has lived his whole life. He is defined by his loyalty to both the Sartorises and his own appetites. The grandson of Joby, Simon was born a slave, but he has only good memories of the old plantation, and still calls Colonel Sartoris "Marse John" when he talks to him, and he still talks to him although "Marse John" has been dead for forty years (112).
