The Compson place on the edge of Jefferson was originally one of the largest and oldest antebellum slave plantations in Yoknapatawpha, built on a square mile of land "granted to Quentin Compson in 1821" by "Mahataha, the Chickasaw matriarch" (367); it is also a major site in Faulkner's imagination. The Town reminds readers of this earlier history before going on to add a couple ironic new chapters.
In Light in August the antebellum plantation that the Burden family buys when they arrive in Yoknapatawpha after the Civil War is a major site, a dark house where Joanna is born, lives and dies violently. The Town it makes a cameo appearance when others refer to "Miss Joanna Burden's mailbox one mile west of the courthouse" as part of an attempt to convince Tug Nightingale that the earth is round (206).
This unnamed Bishop boy is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He is identified as "the youngest Bishop," but the novel says nothing about the others in his family (222). (In The Mansion a man named Ephriam Bishop is the sheriff.)
The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in the novel: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153).
Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," there is no mention of the fact in the novel.)
Mr. Wildermark owns a store on Courthouse Square and orders "men's shoes which buttoned, with toes like small tulip bulbs, of an archaic and obsolete pattern," for Miss Mannie Hait once a year (244).
Buddy is the father of Anse McCallum. His feistiness and sense of fair play are in view when he arranges a rematch of his son Anse's fistfight with Matt Levitt and threatens to take off his cork leg and whip his son with it "if you cant be licked fair without picking up a fence rail" (207). (Why he has a cork leg is explained in the earlier story "The Tall Men.")
Anse is the son of Buddy McCallum, and he gets into a fistfight with Linda's love interest, Matt Levitt, that ultimately leads to Matt's expulsion from Jefferson. His family has deep roots in northeast Yoknapatawpha County.
