Absalom, Absalom! A novel published by Random House, New York, 1936. About the Sutpen family, told largely by by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard, Shrevlin (Shreve) McCannon. The novel takes place during 1807-1910, but it's main focus is around 1833-1869. The title is a reference to Samuel 18, the intimation is that Sutpen, like King David, lost his sons through fratricide.
Alford, Doctor. The nephew of an old Jefferson resident and a doctor in Jefferson, in his thirties around 1920. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Beard, Virgil. The son of Will Beard and the writer of the anonymous letters to Narcissa Benbow for Byron Snopes. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Beard, W.C. The owner of the grist mill and cotton gin in Jefferson. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Beard, Will. The owner of the boarding house in Jefferson where Byron Snopes stayed. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Benbow, Mrs. Belle. The divorced wife of Harry Mitchell and later wife of Horace Benbow. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Benbow, Francis. The grandfather of Horace and Narcissa Benbow. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Benbow, Horace. The son of Will and Julia Benbow and brother of Mrs. Bayard Sartoris III (Narcissa). Born around 1886. He was a student at Sewanee and later at Oxford (England). Was a soldier in WWI (he served in the YMCA). When he returned from the war he took over his father's law practice. Sometime in the 1920's he married Belle Mitchell, the divorced wife of Harry Mitchell of Jefferson, and moved into the county to Kinston to practice law. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Benbow, Narcissa. Sister of Horace Benbow. She married Bayard Sartoris III in 1919 when she was twenty-six. They had one son, Benbow Sartoris, who was born on June 11, 1920. She was involved in a situation concerning some love letters sent to her anonymously by Byron Snopes and later stolen back by him. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Benbow, Will. The father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Du Pre, Virginia. Known as Miss Jenny or Aunt Jenny, she was a sister of Colonel Sartoris. She came from Carolina in 1869 to live with the family. She died in 1930. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Flags in the Dust. Printed by Random House, New York, 1973. This novel is the complete text which appeared in a cut version as Sartoris. Focuses on the Sartoris family, especially Bayard Sartoris III, but extends the story to include many Jeffersonian characters in varying degrees.
Jefferson. The county seat of Yoknapatawpha County, situated in almost the exact geographic center of the county. It is seventy-five miles southeast of Memphis and forty miles from Oxford, Mississippi. It originated around 1800 as a Chicksaw Agency trading post. A Doctor Samuel Habersham was the agent, and the place was originally called Habersham's or simply Habersham. After the doctor and the two others who had come with him died, the leaders of the community became Jason Lycurgus Compson, the post trader Ratcliffe, and Doctor Peabody. They were instrumental in getting the courthouse built. In 1833 the settlement was named Jefferson, after the mail rider Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, to appease him for the so-called theft of a lock removed from the mailpouch to put on the jail door. Most of the early history of Jefferson is found in Requiem for a Nun.
Mitchell, Harry. A friend of the Sartorises and Benbows in Jefferson. His wife Belle divorced him and married Horace Benbow. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Redlaw (Redmond, Ben J.). A lawyer, a carpetbagger from Missouri who stayed in Jefferson and later became associated with Colonel Sartoris in building the railroad through Jefferson. He ran for legislature against the Colonel, and when he was defeated he shot and killed the Colonel. He was later faced by the Colonel's son Bayard, at whom he shot and missed, and then left town and was not heard of again. Appears in Sartoris (Flags in the Dust).
Sartoris. A novel published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1929. Dedicated to Sherwood Anderson. About the Sartoris family, especially around 1919-1920. Faulkner's first published novel in the Yoknapatawpha series.
Sartoris Bayard I. The brother of Colonel John Sartoris. He was born around 1838 and was a soldier in the Civil War. He was killed in 1862 by a Union Army cook when he tried to "capture" some anchovies from the army mess. The name Bayard means gentleman of great courage and honor, and derives from the knight the Chevalier Bayard (1473?-1524). The name spelled with a small letter, however, also means stupid or blindly reckless person.
Sartoris, Bayard II. The son of Colonel John Sartoris. He was born around 1852 at the Sartoris plantation, four miles north of Jefferson. During the Civil War he was engaged in a number of exciting adventures along with his Negro companion Ringo and ran down and killed the man Grumby who had murdered his grandmother. He later studied law at Oxford, Mississippi. He married and had one son, John, who died in 1901. He became mayor of Jefferson around 1894 and a few years later established the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Jefferson. He died of a heart attack in December 1919 while on a wild car ride with his grandson Bayard III.
Sartoris, Bayard III. The son of John Sartoris II, grandson of Bayard Sartoris II, and twin brother of John Sartoris III. He was born on March 16, 1893. He studied at the University of Virginia, and then taught flying at a Memphis school, where he met and married Caroline White. She and a newborn child died on October 27, 1918, while Bayard was overseas as a flyer with the Canadian Air Corps. When he returned home he married Narcissa Benbow. He was killed testing a defective airplane at Akron, Ohio, June 11, 1920, the same day his son, Benbow Sartoris, was born.
Sartoris, Colonel John. The first of the Sartorises in Yoknapatawpha County. He was born in Carolina in 1823 and reported to have arrived in Jefferson around 1837, where he built a large plantation home four miles north of the city. He married a Millard girl and had, two daughters and a son. During the Civil War he recruited a regiment in Yoknapatawpha County and became a colonel. A year later he was demoted and his place was taken by Thomas Sutpen. He remarried in 1865, a cousin of his first wife, a girl named Drusilla Hawk. He killed two carpetbaggers who were trying to take over the county during the Reconstruction Period. He built a railroad in the county, and when it was finished (in 1876) he ran for Congress. He was shot and killed by his partner in the railroad enterprise, Ben J. Redmond, on September 4, 1876.
Sartoris, John II. The son of Bayard Sartoris II, and the father of the twins Bayard III and John III. He married a girl named Lucy Cranston. He had been wounded in the Spanish-American War and died of yellow fever in 1901.
Sartoris, John III. The son of John Sartoris II and a twin brother of Bayard Sartoris III. He was born on March 16, 1893. He went to Princeton and then joined the Canadian Air Corps and was killed in action on July 5, 1918.
Snopes, Byron. The son of Wesley Snopes and a brother of Virgil. He was sent to business school in Memphis by Bayard Sartoris and then became a bookkeeper in the Sartoris bank. He used to write anonymous love letters to Narcissa Benbow, and when she married Bayard Sartoris III he stole the letters back, embezzled some money from the bank, and disappeared. He fled to Mexico, and nothing was heard from of him for ten years, when Flem received by express four of his half-breed children.
Sutpen, Thomas. The founder of the Sutpen family in Yoknapatawpha County. He was born in the mountain country of western Virginia in 1807, and around 1820 went to Haiti, where he married Eulalia Bon, the daughter of a French planter there. They had one son, Charles Bon. When Sutpen discovered that his wife had Negro blood he divorced her. He arrived in Jefferson in 1833, and built himself a large plantation in the northwestern part of Yoknapatawpha County on a hundred acres of land gotten from the Chickasaws. He married Ellen Coldfield of Jefferson in 1838. They had two children, Henry and Judith. His whole life was dedicated to establishing a family, and when his son disappeared he tried other means of getting a male heir. When he spurned Milly Jones because her child by him was female, he was killed by Wash Jones, Milly's grandfather. This was in 1869. Appears in Absolam, Absolam!
Yoknapatwpha County. A county in northwestern Mississippi. Its county seat is Jefferson. It is bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River (an actual river in Mississippi), and on the south by the Yoknapatwpha River. It consists of 2,400 square miles. It was originally Chickasaw country. Most of the eastern half is pine hill country, and there is a small section of pine hill country in the southwest corner also. The county was settled by whites around 1800. In 1936 the population was 15, 611, of which 6,298 were whites and 9,313 were Negroes. Before the Civil War the country consisted of several large plantations: Grenier's in the southeast, McCaslin's in the northeast, Sutpen's in the northwest, and Compson's and Sartoris' in the immediate vicinity of Jefferson. Later the county became mostly small farms. The name Yoknapatwpha is derived from two Chickasaw words-- Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land." That was the original name for the actual Yocona River which runs through the southern part of Lafayette County, of which Oxford is the county seat. The compound word, however, according to Faulkner, means "water flowing slow through the flatland." The word is pronounced Yok'na pa TAW pha.