The seventh, "An Odor of Verbena," was written specifically to demonstrate how Bayard makes the moral decision not to kill and finds the courage to face his father's murderer unarmed. It is a stance that his grandson Young Bayard in Sartoris, approximately forty-three years later would be unable to take. The decline of the old family traditions would by then be about complete.
Even though the newest member, the infant Benbow Sartoris, is yet to prove himself, he is the child of troubled and weak parents, and his future must merge somehow with that of the South in the mid-twentieth century. It is his masterpiece, a work which most critics consider to be one of the great tragic novels of the twentieth century. In the words of one scholar, Melvin Backman, it is the novel in which Faulkner. This assessment applies to the book published not more than nine months after the "apprentice" writing of Sartoris.
He began it as a short story, tentatively called "Twilight," which very quickly became too small a vehicle for the tale Faulkner was imagining. The story of children being sent outside to play because they were too young to be told what was going on inside developed into a stream-of-consciousness novel with four characters each telling his version of the events that caused the demise of yet another old Southern family, this time the Compson family.
When the novel first appeared, the reviews were mixed. Some readers could not get beyond the strange surface and structure. This limitation caused critic Winfield T. Scott to assure his readers that the novel was "tiresome," full of "sound and fury--signifying nothing.
By when the novel was reprinted, however, scholars were beginning to reassess its significance. Today it is a classic of modern literature and an abundance of criticism exists. It is recognized as more than just the story of another doomed Southern family. It is a study of alienation and the destruction of the bridge between the self and society.
Faulkner was incredibly productive during the years of to Between the time he finished Flags in the Dust in September and the time he read galley proofs for Sanctuary in November , Faulkner wrote Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying , revised the Quentin Compson section of The Sound and the Fury , and sent out to publishers at least twenty-seven short stories. Faulkner said, at the time, that he wrote Sanctuary to make money, hoping that his shocking story would find a publisher and sell, perhaps even 10, copies.
He probably did need money and he may have written quickly he claimed he wrote the book in three weeks. But his manuscript at the University of Virginia reveals as much struggle with this text as with his most difficult work. And when the galleys arrived a year and a half after the initial writing, he revised again, very heavily.
The result is a highly serious work, an intense analysis of evil. Critic Melvin Backman summarizes Faulkner's progression as a writer and artist during the extremely busy years of and He describes a pattern in the changing character of Faulkner's sick heros: The vague guilt and despair of Bayard Sartoris evolved into the specific obsession of Quentin Compson and then into the futility of Horace Benbow Sanctuary.
That Horace's sense of frustration is not as extreme as Bayard's or Quentin's -- Horace did not commit suicide and did not make an attempt to struggle against his society -- suggests some lessening of the malaise.
Yet all three novels -- Sartoris , The Sound and the Fury , and Sanctuary -- are dominated by the feeling of alienation. As I Lay Dying breaks from this absorption with the isolated hero.
It is instead a study of community, simple country folk the Tulls, Armstids, and Bundrens , that is almost comic, and certainly reflective of some faith in humanity. The central characters are human beings, more complex than the symbols of evil, estrangement, and post-World-War-I despair that had been important foci in the previous novels.
Each character narrates his or her own version of the events, in this regard similar to The Sound and the Fury. In the summer of Faulkner began work with a new story he entitled "Dark Horse. Faulkner said later that "I used it because in my country there's a peculiar quality to light and that's what that title means.
The novel was difficult to write. The original manuscript is one of Faulkner's longest, full of false starts, marginal inserts, cancellations, discarded sheets, and paste-ons. It began first as the story of Reverend Gail Hightower; then several attempts brought other minor characters into prominence; but eventually the novel became the story of Joe Christmas, a solitary figure who, in the words of Joseph Blotner, "shows the terrible effects of the vicious prejudice and vindictive religiosity visited upon him from earliest childhood.
Faulkner sent the manuscript to his agent Ben Wasson and then to his publisher Harrison Smith. Smith's association with Jonathan Cape was falling apart, moving from receivership to liquidation.
We'll have to cut the rails, too"; when he said that, Ringo and I probably had exactly the same vision. He was on Jupiter now; he wore the frogged gray field-officer's tunic; and while we watched he drew the sabre. Giving us a last embracing and comprehensive glance he drew it, already pivoting Jupiter on the tight snaffle; his hair tossed beneath the cocked hat, the sabre flashed and glinted; he cried, not loud yet stentorian: "Trot!
The sun had gone out of the bottom when we finished the fence, that is, left Joby and Loosh with the last three panels to put up, but it was still shining up the slope of the pasture when we rode across it, I behind Father on one of the mules and Ringo on the other one.
So we went back to the new pen, with the talf following nuzzling and prodding at the cow every time she stopped to snatch a mouthful of grass, and the sow trotting on ahead.
She the sow was the one who moved slow. She seemed to be moving slower than the cow even while the cow was stopped with Ringo leaned to the taut jerk of the rope and hollering at the cow, so it was dark sure enough when we reached the new pen. But there was still plenty of gap left to drive the stock through. But then, we never had worried about that. We drove them in—the two mules, the cow and calf, the sow; we put up the last panel by feel, and went back to the house. It was a big trunk and heavy even when empty; it had not been hi the kitchen when we left to build the pen so it had been fetched down some time during the afternoon, while Joby and Loosh were in the bottom and nobody there to carry it down but Granny and Louvinia, and then Father later, after we came back to the house on the mule, so that was a part of the need and urgency too; maybe it was Father who carried the trunk down from the attic too.
It didn't take us long to eat. Father had already eaten once early in the afternoon, and besides that was what Ringo and I were waiting for: for after supper, the hour of laxed muscles and full entrails, the talking. Then we listened. We heard: the names—Forrest and Morgan and Barksdale and Van Dorn; the words like Gap and Run which we didn't have in Mississippi even though we did own Barksdale, and Van Dorn until somebody's husband killed him, and one day General Forrest rode down South Street in Oxford where there watched him through a window pane a young girl who scratched her name on it with a diamond ring: Celia Cook.
That's what we intended to hear tonight. Edinburgh , F. So Ringo and I squatted again and waited quietly while Granny sewed beside the lamp on the table and Father sat in his old chair in its old place, his muddy boots crossed and lifted into the old heel-marks beside the cold and empty fireplace, chewing the tobacco which Joby had loaned him. Joby was a good deal older than Father. He was too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war.
He had come to Mississippi from Carolina with Father and he had been Father's body servant all the time that he was raising and tram-ing Simon, Ringo's father, to take over when he Joby 23 got too old, which was to have been some years yet except for the War.
So Simon went with Father; he was still in Tennessee with the army. Vve waited for Father to begin; we waited so long that we could tell from the sounds that Louvinia was almost through in the kitchen: so that I decided Father was waiting for Louvinia to finish and come in to hear too, so I said, "How can you fight in mountains, Father? You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed. But not all the way; we stopped and sat on the top step, just out of the light from the hall lamp, watching the door to the Office, listening; after a while Louvinia crossed the hall without looking up and entered the Office; we could hear Father and her: "Is the trunk ready?
Hit's ready. She came out; she crossed the hall again without even looking up the stairs, who used to follow us up and stand in the bedroom door and scold at us until we were in bed—I in the bed itself, Ringo on the pallet beside it.
But this time she not only didn't wonder where we were, she didn't even think about where we might not be. What you reckon" "Shhhh," I said. We could hear Father's voice, talking to Granny. After a while Louvinia came back and crossed the hall again. We sat on the top step, listening to Father's voice telling Granny and Louvinia both. We were in the shadow; I couldn't see anything but his eyeballs.
Do he mean hit fell off hi the River? With Gin-rul Pemberton in hit too? We sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father. She didn't even scold us. She followed us up stairs and stood in the door to the bedroom and she didn't even light the lamp; she couldn't have told whether or not we had undressed even if she had been paying enough attention to suspect that we had not.
She may have been listening as Ringo and I were, to what we thought we heard, though I knew better, just as I knew that we had slept on the stairs for some time; I was telling myself, 'They have already carried it out, they are in the orchard now, digging. But I don't know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone. Get the cook book, Marengo.
What kind of cake? We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather AMBUSCADE 25 just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.
The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon; the sun was shining when I stepped out onto the back gallery, with Ringo already saying, "Where we going? Watch who? He was staring at me, his eyeballs white and quiet like last night. Who tole us to watch him? I just know. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows. When he knocked it over. He knowed it then, already. Go on; what else did the dream tole you? To watch him. That he would know before we did.
Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen.
So we got to watch him. We watched them for two days, hidden. We realised then what a close watch Louvinia had kept on us all the time. Sometimes while we were hidden watching Loosh and Joby load the wagon, we would hear her yelling at us, and we would have to sneak away and then run to let Louvinia find us coming from the other direction. Sometimes she would even meet us before we had time to circle, and Ringo hiding behind me then while she scolded at us: "What devilment yawl into now?
Yawl up to something. What is it? So we were outside of his and Philadelphy's cabin that night when he came out. We followed him down to the new pen and heard him catch the mule and ride away. We ran, but when we reached the road, too, we could only hear the mule loping, dying away. But we had come a good piece, because even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. He didn't get back until after dark the next day. We stayed close to the house and watched the road by turns, to get Louvinia calmed down in case it would be late before he got back.
It was late; she had followed us up to bed and we had slipped out again; we were just passing Joby's cabin when the door opened and Loosh kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us. He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen.
And when we looked in the window he was standing in front of the AMBUSCADE 27 fire, with his clothes torn and muddy where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the Patrollers and with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him and Philadelphy's mouth open too and the same look on her face.
Then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her behind us yet there she was, with one hand on the door jamb, looking at Loosh, and again she didn't have on Father's old hat.
We ran into the room where Granny was sitting beside the lamp with the Bible open on her lap and her neck arched to look at us across her spectacles. They're just down the road. It's General Sherman and he's going to make us all free! Then she shouted, too, and her voice was strong and loud as Louvinia's: "You Bayard Sartoris! Ain't you in bed yet?
Louvinia came in. And Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him. Ringo whimpered. Now and then Louvinia hollered at us, but we told her where we were and that we were making another map, and besides, she could see the cedar copse from the kitchen.
It was cool and shady there, and quiet, and Ringo slept most of the tune, and I slept some too. For a long time we just lay there looking at him. I don't know what we had expected to see, but we knew what he was at once; I remember thinking, "He looks just like a man," and then Ringo and I were glaring at each other, and then we were crawling backward down the hill without remembering when we started to crawl, and then we were running across the pasture toward the house without remembering when we got to our feet.
We seemed to run forever, with our heads back and our fists clenched, before we reached the fence and fell over it and ran on into the house. Granny's chair was empty beside the table where her sewing lay. It weighed about fifteen pounds, though it was not the weight so much as the length; when it came free, it and the chair and all went down with a tremendous clatter. We heard Granny sit up in her bed upstairs, and then we heard her voice: "Who is it? We ran through the grove toward the road and ducked down behind the honeysuckle just as the horse came around the curve.
We didn't hear anything else, maybe because of our own breathing or maybe because we were not expecting to hear anything else. We didn't look again either; we were too busy cocking the musket. We had practiced before, once or twice when Granny was not there and Joby would come in to examine it and change the cap on the nipple. Ringo held it up and I took the barrel in both hands, high, and drew myself up and shut my legs about it and slid down over the hammer until it clicked.
That's what we were doing, we were too busy to look; the musket was already riding up across Ringo's back as he stooped, his hands on his knees and panting, "Shoot the bastud! Shoot him! It sounded like thunder and it made as much smoke as a brush fire, and I heard the horse scream, but I didn't see anything else; it was Ringo wailing, "Great God, Bayard! Hit's the whole army! We ran on into the room where Granny was standing beside the righted chair, her hand at her chest.
At the gate! Only there was the whole army, too, and we never saw them, and now they are coming. But her voice was strong as ever: "What's this? You, Marengo! What have you done? Only it didn't need her face; we heard the hoofs jerking and sliding in the dirt, and one of them hollering, "Get around to the back there, some of you! Then we heard the boots and spurs on the porch.
What is this? What are they trying to tell me? I could still hear it, my ears were still ringing, so that Granny and Ringo and I all seemed to be talking far away.
Then she said, "Quick! Where are they! We saw ther run in here! There is no one here i all except my servant and myself and the people i the quarters. Sen some of the boys upstairs," he said.
And tell them fe lows out back to comb the barn and the cabins too. You set still. Be ter for you if you had done a little asking before yc sent them little devils out with this gun. Hell, yes! Broke his back and we had to sho are, riding peaceful along the road, not bothering nobody yet, and these two little devils The best horse in the army; the whole regiment betting" "Ah," the colonel said.
Have you found them? But these rebels are like rats when it comes to hiding. She says that there ain't even any children here. She said how she could see his eyes going from Granny's face down to where her skirt was spread, and looking at her skirt for a whole minute and then going back to her face. And that Granny gave him look for look while she lied. Louvinia said he looked back at the sergeant. Evidently the shot came from somewhere else. You may call the men in and mount them. All of us saw them!
Where are your ears, sergeant? Or do you really want the artillery to overtake us, with a creek bottom not five miles away to be got over? But if it was me was colo"Then, doubtless, I should be Sergeant Harrison.
In which case, I think I should be more concerned about getting another horse to protect my wager next Sunday than over a grandchildless old lady"—Louvinia said his eyes just kind of touched Granny now and flicked away —"alone in a house which, in all probability—and for her pleasure and satisfaction, I am ashamed to say, I hope—I shall never see again.
Mount your men and get along. But we did not move yet, because Granny's body had not relaxed at all, and so we knew that the colonel was still there, even before he spoke—the voice short, brisk, hard, with that something of laughing behind it: "So you have no grandchildren.
What a pity in a place like this which two boys would enjoy—sports, fishing, game to shoot at, perhaps the most exciting game of all, and none the less so for being, possibly, a little rare this near the house.
And with a gun— a very dependable weapon, I see. Which is just as well. Because if it were your weapon—which it is not—and you had two grandsons, or say a grandson and a Negro playfellow—which you have not—and if this were the first tune— which it is not—someone next time might be seriously hurt.
But what am I doing? Trying your patience by keeping you in that uncomfortable chair while I waste my time delivering a homily suitable only for a lady with grandchildren—or one grandchild and a Negro companion. But if a glass of cool milk after your ride" Only, for a long time he didn't answer at all; Lou-vinia said how he just looked at Granny with his hard bright eyes and that hard bright silence full of laughing. You are taxing yourself beyond mere politeness and into sheer bravado.
And we breathed, too, now, looking at each other. I have three boys myself, you see. And I have not even had time to become a grandparent. We heard his spurs in the hall and on the porch, then the horse, dying away, ceasing, and then Granny let go. She went back into the chair with her hand at her breast and her eyes closed and the sweat on her face in big drops; all of a sudden I began to holler, "Louvinia!
Then she looked at Ringo for a moment, but she looked back at me, panting. You cursed. You used obscene language, Bayard. I could see Ringo's feet too. She didn't answer, but I could feel her looking at me; I said suddenly: "And you told a lie. You said we were not here. She moved. We didn't know what she was trying to do. We just stood there while she held to us and to the chair and let herself down to her knees beside it. It was Ringo that knelt first. Then I knelt, too, while she asked the Lord to forgive her for telling the lie.
Then she rose; we didn't have tune to help her. For a while, just by breathing we could blow soap bubbles, but soon it was just the taste of the spitting. When Father came home in the spring, we tried to understand about mountains. At last he pointed out the cloud bank to tell us what mountains looked like. So ever since then Ringo believed that the cloud-bank was Tennessee. Tennessee, where Marse John use to fight um at.
Looking mighty far, too. But it was gone now—the suds, the glassy weightless iridescent bubbles; even the taste of it. Then Granny went up stairs and when she came back down she had on her Sunday black silk and her hat, and there was color in her face now and her eyes were bright. You gonter dig hit up from where hit been hid safe since last summer, and take hit all the way to Memphis? Louvinia stood there in the pantry door, looking at the back of Granny's head.
Who gonter find hit, even if they was to come here again? Hit's Marse John they done called the reward on; hit ain't no trunk full of" "I have my reasons," Granny said. But how come you wanter dig hit up tonight when you ain't leaving until tomor" "You do what I said," Granny said. She went out. I looked at Granny eating, with her hat sitting on the exact top of her head, and Ringo looking at me across the back of Granny's chair with his eyes rolling a little.
Joby says that trunk will weigh a thousand pounds. She and Ringo looked exactly alike, except that Louvinia's eyes were not rolling so much as his. She looked at Louvinia. Then she said, "Did you know him? Louvinia turned to Ringo. Joby was sitting behind the stove with a plate on his knees, eating. Loosh was sitting on the wood box, still, with the two shovels between his knees, but I didn't see him at first because of Ringo's shadow.
The lamp was on the table, and I could see the shadow of Ringo's head bent over and his arm working back and forth, and Louvinia standing between us and the lamp, her hands on her hips and her elbows spread and her shadow filling the room. Joby carried the lantern, with Granny behind him, and then Loosh; I could see her bonnet and Loosh's head and the two shovel blades over his shoulder. Ringo was breathing behind me. We were in the orchard now.
I bet if she stayed here wouldn't no Yankee nor nothing else bother that trunk, nor Marse John neither, if he knowed hit. Then, with Granny in front and still carrying the lantern and with Ringo and I both helping to carry it, we returned toward the house. Before we reached the house Joby began to bear away toward where the loaded wagon stood. So, after a while, Joby moved on toward the house.
Inside the kitchen he let his end down, hard. Joby turned and looked at her. He hadn't straightened up yet; he turned, half stooping, and looked at her. She had already undressed. She looked tall as a ghost, in one dimension like a bolster case, taller than a bolster case in her nightgown; silent as a ghost on her bare feet which were the same color as the shadow in which she stood so that she seemed to have no feet, the twin rows of her toenails lying weightless and faint and still as two rows of faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected with her.
She came and shoved Joby aside and stooped to lift the trunk. JOby groaned, then he shoved Louvinia aside. He lifted his end of the trunk, then he looked back at Loosh, who had never let his end down.
We carried the trunk up to Granny's room, and Joby was setting it down again, until Granny made him and Loosh pull the bed out from the wall and slide the trunk in behind it; Ringo and I helped again. I don't believe it lacked much of weighing a thousand pounds. As it was, the bed merely underlined it.
Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had heard a key turn in the lock. She had not stopped; she was already reclining on her cot and as we looked toward her she was already in the act of drawing the quilt up over her face and head.
The lamp was lighted and there was already laid out across two chairs our Sunday clothes which we too would put on tomorrow to go to Memphis in. His smuggling, although motivated by money, made him a hero to Aunt Jenny and her peers.
In The Unvanquished these are the children of the "hill man" whom Colonel Sartoris shoots after the War; they live with their mother in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" In The Unvanquished this man lives with his family in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" outside Jefferson He served under John Sartoris in his first regiment.
After the war Sartoris shoots and kills him, because he thinks perhaps wrongly that the man plans to rob him. In The Unvanquished this woman - even though she is dirt poor literally, as she lives in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" - maintains her pride by throwing back the money John Sartoris offers her after he shot her husband In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished these are the people who live in the various "houses on the road" to Memphis; "at least once a day" Granny, Bayard and Ringo stop to eat with them 23, In "Retreat" as both a story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished , these townspeople "stop along the walk, like they always did," to listen to Uncle Buck shouting his praise for Colonel Sartoris 21, In the novel version, Faulkner adds a phrase that may signal a change in the way we are meant to regard Buck: "not smiling so he could see it" And in the novel, the people in Jefferson appear again in "An Odor of Verbena" to watch as Bayard makes his way to Redmond's office, following him with their "remote still eyes" These are the various "watchers - the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not" 96 - who assemble near Hawkhurst to witness the contest between a Confederate and a Union locomotive described by Drusilla Hawk.
Drusilla implies that many of these spectators were part of a "grapevine" of oppressed and deprived people who knew of the raid before it happened In The Unvanquished these men are originally depicted as the "row of feet" that Bayard sees propped on the porch railing when he arrives at Holston House to confront Redmond Afterward, when Bayard leaves the hotel, this same group "raises their hats" out of respect for him This is the "band" that plays in The Unvanquished when Colonel Sartoris drives the first train on the newly finished track into Jefferson In The Unvanquished Bayard describes "the Patroller sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off " having caught some of the Satoris slaves away from the plantation In the antebellum South patrollers watched at night to capture any slaves who were out of their quarters without authorization from their owners, and pursued fugitive slaves.
A military quartermaster is in charge of providing supplies to the forces. In The Unvanquished , the "some northern people" - presumably bankers or businessmen - sell John Sartoris a locomotive on credit He pays them on "Saturdays" In a passage Faulkner added to "Retreat" when the story was published as a chapter in The Unvanquished , Bayard describes the unconventional way Buck and Buddy treat the large number of enslaved people they inherited from their father.
The two white slave-owners move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" 46 , and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night. In The Unvanquished the son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins' was killed in "almost the last battle" of the Civil War, which would have been sometime in When he died, he was about the same age as Bayard is in "An Odor of Verbena.
In The Unvanquished just enough is said about the third partner in the railroad owned by John Sartoris and Ben Redmond to make him mysterious: "he and his name both had vanished," Bayard says, "in the fury of the conflict" between the other two partners In an event added to "Raid" in the novel The Unvanquished , Drusilla Hawk recounts a dramatic contest, "like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time," between two trains, one manned by Confederates and the other in pursuit, manned by these Union forces Drusilla labels the train itself "the Yankee one," does not describe the men who are driving it In The Unvanquished Bayard assumes this "watchman" or "picquet" must have been watching to report his arrival at Sartoris to the other veterans of "Father's old troop" ; he does not actually appear in the novel.
In The Unvanquished , when Bayard first rides into town on his way to confront Redmond, these "women" are the only people he sees on the street, he assumes because it was "long past breakfast and not yet noon" These women recognize Bayard and "stopped sudden and dead" when they realize his potentially fatal errand In The Unvanquished Bayard evokes "the men who have written" of the kind of woman he identifies Drusilla with at this point in the story: the "woman of thirty" In The Unvanquished Jed White is a Civil War veteran, a member of Colonel Sartoris' troop who declares his willingness to serve the new Sartoris - Bayard - in a quest to restore his family's honor after the Colonel's murder.
In The Unvanquished Mrs. Wilkins and her husband give Bayard a home while he is pursuing a law degree in Oxford, Mississippi.
She is a "small" woman whose little gestures "she just put her hands on my shoulders" reveal her big compassion for Bayard He seems to have grown fond of Bayard and calls him "my son" when he has to deliver the sad news about Bayard's father's murder Professor and student have had conversations about the principles of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, particularly "Thou shalt not kill.
Bayard refers to him as "Judge Wilkins" Peabody mentions Abe as one of the gillies who help the gentlemen who come to fish his pond. When asked "how many [other black retainers] have you got," Peabody says "six or seven" adults, and an unspecified number of "scrubs" i.
Stuart of his duty to the army in order to keep him from following Carolina Bayard on his reckless quest for anchovies. Alford refers Old Bayard. He is supposed to live in St.
Both of them express admiration for his character and politics. Vardaman served one term as Governor of Mississippi and one term in the United States Senate A militant segregationist, he vowed to lynch every African American in the state if that ever became necessary.
He opposed U. In Flags in the Dust Eunice is the Benbows' cook. She expresses a sort of maternal concern about Horace's welfare. Narcissa tells her that "Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours" Flags in the Dust begins with "old man Falls" 3. The stories he tells Old Bayard about that past serve to fetch "the spirit of the dead man" into the novel's post World War I present 3 , and the old Choctaw salve with which he successfully treats Bayard's wen reinforces the role he plays as a connection to the old South.
He lives frugally in the county poor farm, regularly walks the three miles into town, and his "faded overalls" give off a "clean dusty smell" 3. In Flags in the Dust Fothergill is a member of Colonel John Sartoris' irregular unit, with a special ability to get behind Union lines and come back with at least one horse.
He and the Colonel are horse racing when Sartoris surprises and captures the company of Yankee cavalry. In Flags in the Dust Frankie is the youngest guest at Belle Mitchell's tennis party, and the first woman in Jefferson who has bobbed her hair. The narrator refers to him as "the stranger," meaning that he is not from Yoknapatawpha First described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as a "young light negress" 27 , Meloney is later referred to by Jenny Du Pre as a "mulatto girl" She is Belle Mitchell's servant when the novel begins, but soon goes into business for herself as a beautician with the money that Simon embezzles from the Second Baptist Church.
At the end of the novel Simon is found murdered in her cabin. In Flags in the Dust he is one of the blacks who sharecrops on the Sartoris estate; he does not appear in the novel, but the possum hunt that Bayard and Narcissa go on with Caspey and Isom begins behind his cabin.
In Flags in the Dust , Joan is Belle Mitchell's younger sister who comes to Jefferson while Belle is away getting a divorce, to see what Horace Benbow is like; during the week she spends in town she and Horace have an affair. By the time she gets to Jefferson she has had a wide experience, both of the world having lived in Hawaii, Australia and India, among other unnamed "random points half the world apart," and of men having been married a least twice and lived with at least one other man.
In Flags in the Dust Hub is the young farmer who provides the illegal moonshine that fuels the road trip Young Bayard takes to Oxford. He is married, and has a sister or a daughter named Sue, but his character seems summed up when he tells Suratt that he "dont give a damn" if anyone tells where the whiskey came from He is clearly a different character from any of the "Hub Hampton"s who are county sheriffs.
She stands in the doorway of her small farm house and watches Hub, Suratt and Young Bayard as they leave to go to town in Flags in the Dust. Her willingness to help her son got her killed at the end. Despite some of her actions, Granny serves as a moral compass to Bayard, which could be seen towards the end when he feels ashamed of lying to Mrs. Wilkins, who reminds him of Granny.
Bayard's development is interwoven with hitting the road, have a life-changing experience and returning home. On the first journey with his Granny and Ringo with a trunk of silver towards Memphis, Bayard experiences his father's world of war. On the second journey Granny and the boys hit the road to recover the trunk of silver and Loosh and his wife. On this journey Bayard learns the cruelty of the war, seeing a lot of homes burned just like his own and he learns about the slaves' hope for a change.
The next journey Bayard and Ringo take is to avenge Granny.
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