The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Named after Charles Stuart the Young Pretender, for whom his father fought in Scotland, Charles Stuart Compson served under the British commander Banastre Tarleton in the American Revolutionary War; Charles Stuart was thus part of the military serving the monarchy his father had formerly opposed. After he is "left for dead" on a colonial battlefield (326), and with an amputated leg, he joins his son and father in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where he tries a series of ventures: teaching school, gambling, and plotting against the American government to give Spain the Mississippi Valley.

Quentin MacLachan Compson, or Quentin I, is the "son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother's people" (326) in the Perth Highlands. He is driven from Culloden Moor, presumably as a result of the rebel Jacobites' last battle against the Hanovarian government of Britain, which occurred at that site in 1746, and flees across the Atlantic to Carolina. In 1779, at age eighty, he flees from the American Revolutionary War to Kentucky with his grandson.

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, where he is raised by them.

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother died when he was a child. Her family was based in "the Perth highlands" in Scotland (326).

Quentin MacLachan Compson's father was a printer in Glasgow; apparently he died when his son was still a child (326).

Dilsey, her daughter Frony, her son TP, and her grandson Luster have separate entries in the "Appendix Compson" and in our database. This entry, however, represents the collective group referred to in the "Appendix" as "Dilsey's family," who lived as a group in the "one servant's cabin" left on the Compson property (330). If Faulkner is thinking of the "family" as he depicts it in The Sound and the Fury and "That Evening Sun," it also includes Dilsey's husband, Roskus, and another son, Versh.

Frony is the daughter of Dilsey, sister to TP, and mother of Luster. Although in The Sound and the Fury she was associated, both as a child and as an adult, with the Compson estate, in the "Appendix" she has moved on. She "married a pullman porter and went to St. Louis to live and later moved back to Memphis to make a home for her mother" (343).

TP is the second son of Roskus and Dilsey Gibson, and brother of Versh and Frony. In The Sound and the Fury, we see "T. P." take on caretaking duties for Benjy Compson, like the other members of this black family. In the "Appendix," however, "TP" (the periods are removed from his name) is given a freer existence: wearing "fine bright cheap intransigent clothes" "on Memphis's Beale Street" (343).

Luster, Benjy Compson's caretaker, is described as "A man, aged 14. Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained" (343). Luster is the son of Frony Gibson, and the grandson of Dilsey Gibson.

Ikkemotubbe, or "Doom," as he rechristens himself, is described as a "dispossessed American king" (325). He is the chief of the Chickasaw tribe that once occupied a "vast lost domain" in Northern Mississippi (325). In the "Appendix," he is described as "a man of wit and imagination as well as a shrewd judge of character, including his own" (325). Although in other Faulkner texts, Doom is often described as powerful, intimidating, and ruthless, his actions in the "Appendix" indicate that his power has limits.