Born into slavery, Louvinia appears in two novels and seven stories as the cook at the Sartoris plantation and, along with her husband Joby, the head of the enslaved family that serves the Sartorises over many generations. When we first meet her, in the story Will Falls tells in Flags in the Dust about the day the Yankees arrived at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, Louvinia is "shellin' a bowl of peas fer supper" (20); she helps her master escape out the back door.
Joby is the oldest among the family of enslaved people who serve as the 'house slaves' of the Sartoris family in two novels and more than half a dozen short stories. He first appears, very briefly, in Flags in the Dust, in the stories Jenny tells about the old days on the plantation; there he is "Simon's grandfather" who helped bury the white family's silver under "the ammoniac barn floor" to hide it from Yankees during the Civil War (37).
In the larger narrative of Yoknapatawpha Horace Benbow's place is a curious one. One of the two central characters in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Horace becomes the first major recurring character in the canon when Faulkner casts him as the protagonist of Sanctuary. After that second appearance he essentially disappears.
Narcissa is born into one of Yoknapatawpha's leading families and marries into another. She plays a major role in three early fictions, which together even form a kind of asymmetrical trilogy. In Flags in the Dust she is the most eligible young woman in Jefferson before she becomes Mrs. Bayard Sartoris. In that novel her role is essentially passive, as she is courted or stalked by men from three very different classes; by the end of it she is a young widow with a newborn son, whom she names Benbow Sartoris.
Julia Benbow, the wife of Will Benbow, and mother of Horace and Narcissa, is mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. According to the first novel, she died when Narcissa was seven years old. Narcissa remembers her as "a gentle figure . . . like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread" (172). She is not named in the second novel, and appears only in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" in conversations with Horace (184).
Will Benbow is presumably the only son of Francis. He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. He married Julia, with whom he had two children, Horace and Narcissa, and practiced law in Jefferson. He died a few years before the U.S. entered World War I. Narcissa remembers him in the first novel as "a darkly gallant shape" - "a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness" (172). He is not mentioned by name in Sanctuary, but only appears in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" (184).
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation.
Francis Benbow is the father of Will Benbow, and grandfather of Horace and Narcissa. He is only mentioned in Flags in the Dust, where the narrative notes that he brought back a lantana tree "from Barbados in a tophat-box in '71 [i.e. 1871]" (164). When he went to the island, however, or what he did there, is not explained.
As a family the Benbows are one of the oldest and most prominent in Jefferson, but the fictions don't provide much detail about the first several generations in town. "Judge Benbow" is mentioned in three fictions from the middle of Faulkner's career. In Absalom! he is mentioned twice: first as a paragon of genteel manners (35), and later as the unofficial executor of the (non-existent) "Estate of Goodhue Coldfield" who chivalrously takes care of Rosa over the years (172); he also has a son named Percy.
In Flags in the Dust Jenny Du Pre refers to the man who built the plantation where she grew up in "Carolina" (whether North or South is never specified) as her "great-great-great-grandfather" (50). That many generations back would make him more or less a contemporary of the fathers and mothers of America's 'Founding Fathers.'
