The Golden Book of
Yoknapatawpha County

Born c 1800, Tennessee, died 1864, Jefferson. Brother of Miss Coldfield, husband of Mrs Coldfield, father of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen and Rosa Coldfield.

Married Mrs Coldfield, became father of Ellen in 1817. Moved with his family (including his sister and mother) to Jefferson in 1828, established a small mercantile business. Methodist steward. Neither drank nor hunted nor gambled. Owned neither land nor slaves except two female house servants who came into his possession through a debt and whom he freed as soon as he got them, bought them, putting them on a weekly wage which he held back in full against the discharge of the current market value at which he had assumed them on the debt.

In April 1838, betrothed his daughter Ellen to Thomas Sutpen, apparently moved by his hundred miles of plantation (Sutpen’s Hundred).

In 1845 his wife gave birth to their daughter Rosa and died in labour.

Opposed the civil war as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. Closed his store and kept it closed all during the period that soldiers were being mobilised and drilled, refused to sell any goods for any price not only to the military but, so it was told, to the families not only of soldiers but of men or women who had supported secession and war only in talk, opinion. Refused to permit his sister to come back home to live while her horse-trader husband was in the army. His two house servants were among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops.

Eventually closed his store permanently. Lived with his daughter Rosa in the back of the house, with the front door locked and the front shutters closed and fastened, and where, so the neighbours said, he spent the day behind one of the slightly opened blinds like a picquet on post, armed not with a musket but with the big family bible until a detachment of troops would pass: whereupon he would open the bible and declaim in a harsh loud voice even above the sound of the tramping feet, the passages of the old violent vindictive mysticism which he had already marked as the actual picquet would have ranged his row of cartridges along the window sill. Then one morning in 1861 he learned that his store had been broken into and looted, doubtless by a company of strange troops bivouacked on the edge of town and doubtless abetted, if only vocally, by his own fellow citizens. That night he mounted to the attic with his hammer and his handful of nails and nailed the door behind him and threw the hammer out the window. He was not a coward. He was a man of uncompromising moral strength. He was not a coward, even though his consciousness may have objected not so much to the idea of pouring out human blood and life, but at the idea of waste: of wearing out and eating up and shooting away material in any cause whatever.

Fed by his daughter, who hauled up food at night by means of a well pulley and rope attached to the attic window. Then he died. One morning his hand did not come out to draw up the basket. When his daughter with the help of neighbours broke open the door, they found him with three days’ uneaten food beside his pallet bed.

Left neither will nor estate except the house and the rifled shell of the store. So Judge Benbow appointed himself as executor of his estate, assuming responsibility for his daughter Rosa’s finances.

Sister of Goodhue Coldfield. Came with his family to Jefferson in 1928. Reconciled to his daughter Ellen’s marriage to Thomas Sutpen by that big house and the notion of slaves underfoot day and night. Raised his second daughter Rosa after his wife died in labour, raised her to believe that she was not only delicate but actually precious. One day in early 1860, climbed out of the window and disappeared eloping with a horse- and mule-trader whom she subsequently married. Was refused permission by her brother to come home after her husband had gone off to fight in the Civil War. Last heard of in 1863 while trying to pass the Yankee lines to reach Illinois and so be near the Rock Island prison where her husband, who had offered his talents for horse- and mule-getting to the Confederate cavalry remount corpse and had been caught at it, was now.

Born c 1800–1802, Tennessee, died 1845. Wife of Goodhue Coldfield, mother of Ellen and Rosa Coldfield. Married Goodhue Coldfield, gave birth to Ellen in 1817. The family moved to Jefferson in 1828. Died while giving birth to Rosa in 1845.

Born 1845, Jefferson, died 8 January 1910. Daughter of Goodhue and Mrs Coldfield, sister of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen. Born very late into her parents’ marriage, her mother dying in labour, for which she never forgave her father. Raised by her spinster aunt Miss Coldfield. had never been taught to do anything practical because the aunt had raised her to believe that she was not only delicate but actually precious

After her father’s store was looted, he bolted himself shut in the attic. Now her life consisted of keeping it in herself and her father. She was cooking the food which as time passed became harder and harder to come by and poorer and poorer in quality, and hauling it up to her father at night by means of a well pully and rope attached to the attic window. She did this for three years, feeding in secret and at night and with food which in quantity was scarcely sufficient for one.

Moved to Sutpen’s Hundred in June 1865, following the death of her sister and her father, for food and shelter and to fulfil her sister’s dying wish that she should look after her (four years elder) niece Judith Sutpen. Became engaged to Thomas Sutpen in April 1866 but broke off the engagement and moved back to her family home in Jefferson in June, after he proposed they conceive a child and only marry if it were a boy. Wore only black thereafter, and nothing under the sun, certainly no man nor committee of men, would ever persuade her to go back to her niece and brother-in-law.

Now Judge Benbow and a group of fellow citizens and neighbors left baskets of food on her doorstep at night, the dishes (the plates containing the food, the napkins which covered it) from which she never washed but returned soiled to the empty basket and set the basket back on the same step where she had found it as if to carry completely out the illusion that it had never existed or at least that she had never touched, emptied, it, had not come out and taken the basket up with that air which had nothing whatever of furtiveness in it nor even defiance, who doubtless tasted the food, criticised its quality or cooking, chewed and swallowed it and felt it digest yet still clung to that delusion, that calm incorrigible insistence that that which all incontrovertible evidence tells her is so does not exist, as women can.

Judge Benbow had appointed himself executor of her father’s estate, but that same self deluding declined to admit that the liquidation of the store had left her something, that she had been left anything but a complete pauper, who would not accept the actual money from the sale of the store from Judge Benbow yet would accept the money’s value (and after a few years, over-value) in a dozen ways: would use casual negro boys who happened to pass the house, stopping them and commanding them to rake her yard and they doubtless as aware as the town was that there would be no mention of pay from her, that they would not even see her again though they knew she was watching them from behind the curtains of a window, but that Judge Benbow would pay them — would enter the stores and command objects from the shelves and showcases and walk out of the store with them — who with the same aberrant cunning which would not wash the dishes and napkins from the baskets declined to have any discussion of her affairs with Benbow since she must have known that the sums which she had received from him must have years ago over-balanced whatever the store had brought.

Already in the first year of her father’s voluntary incarceration, dated at two oclock in the morning, she had written the first of her odes to Southern soldiers. After the war, she established herself as the town’s and the county’s poetess laureate by issuing to the stern and meager subscription list of the county newspaper poems, ode, eulogy, and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat. By 1885, her portfolio contained a thousand or more pieces.

After her niece Judith Sutpen died in 1884, she commanded a two hundred dollar headstone from Judge Benbow.

Refused at the last to be a ghost. Visited Sutpen’s Hundred in September 1909 with Quentin (III) Compson to find that Henry had returned and was hiding there. Returned with an ambulance around Christmas, upon which Clytemnestra set fire to the house, killing herself and Henry. Had to be transported back in the ambulance herself, subsequently entering a coma. Died almost two weeks later, 8 January 1910. Buried the next day.

Caddy. Born 1891–92, died after 1943. Second-oldest child of Jason (III) and Caroline Compson, mother of Quentin (IV). Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother Quentin (III) despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family ‘s honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock.

Had several boyfriends, including Dalton Ames, who may have been the father of Quentin (IV), which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead. Married Sydney Herbert Head on 25 April 1910, whom she and her mother had met while vacationing at French Lick the summer before and who gifted her the first car in Jefferson. Already two months pregnant of Quentin (IV) at that point and therefore felt she got to marry someone. Divorced by Herbert Head in 1911, likely because he discovered Quentin (IV) was not his. Entrusted her into the care of her mother and her brother Jason Compson (IV), and departed by the next train. Sent money to Jason (IV) each month for her daughter’s upbringing, who kept it for himself and who generally prevented her from seeing Quentin (IV) again. Seemingly prostituted herself for some time. Not invited to her father’s funeral, but attended it incognito after reading about it in the newspaper.

Remarried 1920 to a minor movingpicture magnate, Hollywood California. Divorced by mutual agreement, Mexico 1925. Vanished in Paris with the German occupation, 1940, still beautiful and probably still wealthy too since she did not look within fifteen years of her actual fortyeight, whereafter she was not seen or heard of again, except by her high school class mate Melissa Meek, who in 1943 recognised her in a picture, a photograph in color clipped obviously from a slick magazine—a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight—a Cannebière backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromium/rimmed sports car, the woman’s face hatless between a rich scarf and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned; beside her a handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral.

Wife of Jason Compson (III). Mother of Quentin (III), Candace, Jason (IV) and Maury Compson. Considered only Jason (IV) to be a Bascomb like herself and her only brother Maury. Despite her husband’s pleading, refused to allow Candace to return after she was divorced by Herbert Head, or even for her name to be pronounced thenceforth. Burned the cheques Candace sent her each month for the upbringing of her daughter Quentin (IV), not knowing that they were in fact replaced by her son Jason (IV) with duplicates, who kept the originals for himself, pretending they were his salary, made out in his mother’s name, having power of attorney over her. Believed herself to be nothing but a burden on him.

Son of Quentin Maclachan Compson (I), father of Jason Lycurgus Compson (I). Attainted and proscribed by name and grade in his British regiment. Left for dead in a Georgia swamp in 1778 by his own retreating army and then by the advancing American one, both of which were wrong. He still had his father’s claymore even when on his homemade wooden leg he finally overtook his father and son in 1782 at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, just in time to bury the father and enter upon a long period of being a split personality while still trying to be the schoolteacher which he believed he wanted to be, until he gave up at last and became the gambler he actually was . Succeeded at last in risking not only his neck but the security of his family and the very integrity of the name he would leave behind him, by joining the confederation headed by an acquaintance named Wilkinson in a plot to secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain. Fled in his turn when the bubble burst (as anyone except a Compson schoolteacher should have known it would), himself unique in being the only one of the plotters who had to flee the country: this not from the vengeance and retribution of the government which he had attempted to dismember, but from the furious revulsion of his late confederates now frantic for their own safety. He was not expelled from the United States, he talked himself countryless, his expulsion due not to the treason but to his having been so vocal and vociferant in the conduct of it, burning each bridge vocally behind him before he had even reached the place to build the next one: so that it was no provost marshal nor even a civic agency but his late coplotters themselves who put afoot the movement to evict him from Kentucky and the United States and, if they had caught him, probably from the world too. Fled by night, running true to family tradition, with his son and the old claymore and the tartan.

Born before 1782. Son of Charles Stuart Compson, father of Quentin Maclachan Compson (II). Named by his father who perhaps still believed with his heart that what he wanted to be was a classicist schoolteacher.

Driven perhaps by the compulsion of the flamboyant name rode up the Natchez Trace one day in 1811 with a pair of fine pistols and one meagre saddlebag on a small lightwaisted but stronghocked mare which could do the first two furlongs in definitely under the halfminute and the next two in not appreciably more, though that was all. But it was enough: reached the Chickasaw Agency that would become Jefferson and went no further.

Participated in races against the horses of Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe’s young men which he was always careful to limit to a quarter or at most three furlongs. Within six months was the Agent’s clerk and within twelve his partner, officially still the clerk though actually halfowner of what was now a considerable store stocked with his mare’s winnings.

After a year, traded his mare with Ikkemotubbe in return for a forested solid square mile of land where he established Compson Place and which someday would be almost in the center of the town of Jefferson.

In 1833, installed Alexander Holston’s lock on the jail door to protect a group of captured bandits against lynching, an act which set into motion a chain of events over the course of the following days resulting in the formal transformation of the settlement into the town named Jefferson.

After work began on Jefferson’s town square in 1834, the first formal survey revealed that Compson Place was so large that the new courthouse would have been only another of his outbuildings. Sold part of his land to the town corporation, at his price.

By 1835, had acquired his first slaves.

Died 1900. Son of Quentin Maclachan Compson (II), husband of Mrs Compson, father of Jason Richmond Compson (III).

After the arrival of Thomas Sutpen in 1933, lent him the seeds with which he started his plantation and became the nearest thing to a friend that Sutpen ever had in Yoknapatawpha County, a friendship that may have helped him to gain a foothold. In the Summer of 1834, joined Sutpen in his pursuit of his run-away Architect.

Married in 1837 or 1838 with Mrs Compson.

Following the outbreak of the Civil War, became Colonel of the 11th Mississippi Infantry regiment, of which Sutpen’s sons Henry and Charles Bon were also members. Failed at Shiloh in 1862. Lost his right arm. Returned home to recover. Was promoted to Brigadier General and rejoined the army in 1864. Failed again though not so badly at Resaca.

In 1869, participated in the construction of the Jefferson railroad into Tennessee with John Sartoris (I) and Ben J Redmond, but was bought out before its completion following a quarrel. In 1870, after Thomas Sutpen’s death, helped his daughter Judith sell his crossroads store and gave her an advance to buy a headstone for Charles (I) Bon. In 1879, quashed an indictment against Charles (I) Bon’s son Charles (II) Etienne De Saint Valery Bon for badly injuring a man and paid his fine and gave him money to move away to be whatever he wanted among strangers.

Put the first mortgage on the Compson Place to a New England carpetbagger in 1866, after the old town had been burned by the Federal General Smith and the new little town had begun to encroach and then nibble at and into it as he spent the next forty years selling fragments of it off to keep up the mortgage on the remainder: until one day in 1900 he died quietly on an army cot in the hunting and fishing camp in the Tallahatchie River bottom where he passed most of the end of his days.

Completed three avatars—the one as son of a brilliant and gallant statesman, the second as battleleader of brave and gallant men, the third as a sort of privileged pseudo-Daniel Boone- Robinson Crusoe, who had not returned to juvenility because actually he had never left it Harboured who knows what dream that his son’s lawyer’s office might again be the anteroom to the governor’s mansion and the old splendor.

Died 1912. Son of Jason Lycurgus Compson (II), husband of Caroline Compson, father of Quentin (III), Candace, Jason (IV) and Maury Compson. Lawyer, keeping an office upstairs above the Square. Alcoholic and ineffectual, but a source of advice to his son Quentin (III). Sat all day long in the house with a decanter of whiskey and a litter of dogeared Horaces and Livys and Catulluses, composing (it was said) caustic and satiric eulogies on both his dead and his living fellowtownsmen. In 1909, sold the remainder of the Compson Place, except that fragment containing the house and the kitchengarden and the collapsing stables and one servant’s cabin in which Dilsey Gibons’s family lived, to a golfclub for the ready money with which his daughter Candace could have her fine wedding and his son Quentin could finish one year at Harvard, i.e. not to buy drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life he could think of. Unsuccessfully tried to persuade his wife Caroline to take Candace back in after she had been divorced by her husband Herbert Head in 1911.

Born 1892–94. Youngest-but-one son of Jason (III) and Caroline Compson.

After his parents had sold off part of the Compson place to pay for his sister Candace’s (failed) marriage to Sydney Head and his brother Quentin (III)’s first year at Harvard (which ended in suicide), used his own niggard savings out of his meagre wages as a storeclerk to send himself to a Memphis school where he learned to class and grade cotton. Started working in Earl Triplett’s farmers’ supply store in Jefferson in 1916. Begrudged Candace and her daughter Quentin (IV) missing out on a position at Sydney Head’s bank that he had been promised, since Sydney Head probably divorced Candace because he discovered Quentin (IV) was not his. Kept for himself the 200 dollar sent each month by Candace for her daughter Quentin (IV), replacing the cheque with a fake one for their mother to burn, and banking the real cheques as his salary on his mother’s account, whom they were made out to and over whom he had power of attorney. His actual salary may have been 160 dollar a month. Used the 1000 dollar his mother invested for him in Earl Triplett’s business to buy himself a car. Had regular headaches, which his mother believed were caused by the gasoline of the car.

The first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last. Logical rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition: thinking nothing whatever of God one way or the other and simply considering the police and so fearing and respecting only the Negro woman, his sworn enemy since his birth and his mortal one since that day in 1911 when she Dilsey Gibson too divined by simple clairvoyance that he was somehow using his infant niece Quentin IV’s illegitimacy to blackmail its mother.

“Following his dipsomaniac father’s death, he assumed the entire burden of the rotting family in the rotting house, supporting his idiot brother Maury Compson because of their mother, sacrificing what pleasures might have been the right and just due and even the necessity of a thirty-year-old bachelor, so that his mother’s life might continue as nearly as possible to what it had been this not because he loved her but (a sane man always) simply because he was afraid of the Negro cook Dilsey Gibson whom he could not even force to leave even when he tried to stop paying her weekly wages.

After his brother Maury touched a passing schoolgirl outside the fence delimiting the Compson Place, had himself appointed the idiot’s guardian without letting their mother know and had it castrated before their mother even knew it was out of the house.

Not only fended off end held his own with Compsons but competed and held his own with the Snopeses who took over the little town Jefferson following the turn of the century as the Compsons and Sartorises and their ilk faded from it. Managed to save almost three thousand dollars ($2840.50) in niggard and agonised dimes and quarters and halfdollars, which hoard he kept in no bank because to him a banker too was just one more Compson, but hid in a locked bureau drawer in his bedroom whose bed he made and changed himself since he kept the bedroom door locked all the time save when he was passing through it. To him all the rest of the town and the world and the human race too except himself were Compsons, inexplicable yet quite predictable in that they were in no sense whatever to be trusted.

On 7 April 1928, his niece Quentin (IV) broke into his room through the window and took off with his savings. He unsuccessfully pursued her to Mottson. The amount she stole was not $2840.50, it was almost seven thousand dollars and this was Jason’s rage, the red unbearable fury which on that night and at intervals recurring with little or no diminishment for the next five years, made him seriously believe would at some unwarned instant destroy him, kill him as instantaneously dead as a bullet or a lightningbolt: that although he had been robbed not of a mere petty three thousand dollars but of almost seven thousand he couldn’t even tell anybody; because he had been robbed of seven thousand dollars instead of just three he could not only never receive justification — he did not want sympathy — from other men unlucky enough to have one bitch for a sister and another for a niece, he couldn’t even go to the police; because he had lost four thousand dollars which did not belong to him he couldn’t even recover the three thousand which did since those first four thousand dollars were not only the legal property of his niece as a part of the money supplied for her support and maintenance by her mother over the last sixteen years, they did not exist at all, having been officially recorded as expended and consumed in the annual reports he submitted to the district Chancellor, as required of him as guardian and trustee by his bondsmen: so that he had been robbed not only of his thievings but his savings too, and by his own victim; he had been robbed not only of the four thousand dollars which he had risked jail to acquire but of the three thousand which he had hoarded at the price of sacrifice and denial, almost a nickel and a dime at a time, over a period of almost twenty years: and this not only by his own victim but by a child who did it at one blow, without premeditation or plan, not even knowing or even caring how much she would find when she broke the drawer open; and now he couldn’t even go to the police for help: he who had considered the police always, never given them any trouble, had paid the taxes for years which supported them in parasitic and sadistic idleness; not only that, he didn’t dare pursue the girl himself because he might catch her and she would talk, so that his only recourse was a vain dream which kept him tossing and sweating on nights two and three and even four years after the event, when he should have forgotten about it: of catching her without warning, springing on her out of the dark, before she had spent all the money, and murder her before she had time to open her mouth.

Probably between 1928 and 1933, he took over the farmers’ supply store from Earl Triplett.

After the death of his mother in 1933 he (no Snopes, but Jason Compson himself) committed his brother Maury to the state asylum in Jackson and vacated the Compson Place, first chopping up the vast oncesplendid rooms into what he called apartments and selling the whole thing to a countryman who opened a boardinghouse in it. Thus he was able to free himself forever not only from the idiot brother and the house but from the Negro woman too, moving into a pair of offices up a flight of stairs above the supplystore containing his cotton ledgers and samples, which he had converted into a bedroom-kitchen-bath, in and out of which on weekends there would be seen a big plain friendly brazenhaired pleasantfaced woman Lorraine no longer very young, in round picture hats and (in its season) an imitation fur coat, the two of them, the middleaged cottonbuyer and the woman whom the town called, simply, his friend from Memphis, seen at the local picture show on Saturday night and on Sunday morning mounting the apartment stairs with paper bags from the grocer’s containing loaves and eggs and oranges and cans of soup, domestic, uxorious, connubial, until the late afternoon bus carried her back to Memphis. He was emancipated now. He was free. ‘In 1865,’ he would say, ‘Abe Lincoln freed the niggers from the Compsons. In 1933, Jason Compson freed the Compsons from the niggers.’

Benjy. Born 7 April 1895. Youngest son of Caroline and Jason Compton III. Mentally handicapped. Originally named after his maternal uncle Maury Bascomb, but rechristened Benjamin by his brother Quentin (Benjamin, our lastborn, sold into Egypt) at age five (in November 1900) when at last even his mother realised what he was and insisted weeping that his name must be changed. Stopped sleeping in the same bed as his sister Candace at age 13. Castrated in 1913 for going through the gate of the Compson place one day and touching a passing school girl. Attended successively by Versh Gibson, T.P. Gibson and Luster.

Loved three things: the pasture which was sold to pay for Candace’s wedding and to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight. Who lost none of them because he could not remember his sister but only the loss of her, and firelight was the same bright shape as going to sleep, and the pasture was even better sold than before because now he and TP could not only follow timeless along the fence the motions which it did not even matter to him were humanbeings swinging golfsticks, TP could lead them to clumps of grass or weeds where there would appear suddenly in TP’s hand small white spherules which competed with and even conquered what he did not even know was gravity and all the immutable laws when released from the hand toward plank floor or smokehouse wall or concrete sidewalk.

Committed to the state asylum in Jackson by his brother Jason (IV) after the death of their mother Caroline in 1933. Lost nothing then either because, as with his sister, he remembered not the pasture but only its loss, and firelight was still the same bright shape of sleep. tSatF

Husband of Mrs Compson. Had been locked up for crazy a long time ago because in the slack parts of the afternoons he would gather up eight or ten little niggers from the quarters and line them up across the creek from him with sweet potatoes on their heads and he would shoot the potatoes off with a rifle; he would tell them he might miss a potato, but he wasn’t going to miss a nigger, and so they would stand mighty still.

Wife of Jason Lycurgus Compson (II). Not from Jefferson. Married in 1837–8.

A good deal older than Rosa Millard. Wife of Mr Compson. Asked by Rosa Millard to look after the Sartoris Place flowers during her aborted attempt to reach her sister in Memphis in the summer of 1863. Lent her a hat, a parasol and a hand mirror after the Sartoris Place was burnt down by a Federate regiment, which she would keep until her death in December 1864.

Born 1698–99, Glasgow, died 1782. Father of Charles Stuart Compson. Son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother’s people in the Perth highlands. Fled to Carolina from Culloden Moor with a claymore and the tartan he wore by day and slept under by night, and little else. At eighty, having fought once against an English king and lost, he would not make that mistake twice and so fled again one night in 1779, with his infant grandson Jason Lycurgus I and the tartan (the claymore had vanished, along with his son, about a year ago) into Kentucky, where a neighbor named Boon or Boone had already established a settlement Boonesborough.

Son of Jason Lycurgus Compson (I), father of Jason Lycurgus Compson (II). Governor of Mississippi. Brilliant and gallant statesman.

Born 1891, died 2 June 1910. Eldest child of Caroline and Jason Compson (III). Used to go out hunting with Versh Gibson all day. Considered honeysuckle to be the saddest odour of all.

In September 1919 taken into confidence by Rosa Coldfield and his father about Thomas Sutpen. Accompanied Coldfield to Sutpen’s Hundred to find Henry Sutpen, who had been hiding there. Thereafter sent to Harvard to study Law, where he became the room mate of Shrevlin McCannon. In January 1920, the pair unraveled the last strands of the family history of Thomas Sutpen and his proginy.

Committed suicide by drowning himself late on 2 June 1910. Fought with Gerald Bland earlier that day, receiving all of the beating himself.

Who loved not his sister Candace’s body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead as a miniature replica of all the whole vast globy earth may be poised on the nose of a trained seal. Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment: he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires. But who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly tender incredible body of-his beloved, until he can no longer bear not the refraining but the restraint and so flings, hurls himself relinquishing, drowning waiting first to complete the current academic year and so get the full value of his paid-in-advance tuition, not because he had his old Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky grandfathers in him but because the remaining piece of the Compson place which had been sold to pay for his sister’s wedding and his year at Harvard had been the one thing, excepting that same sister and the sight of an open fire, which his youngest brother Maury, born an idiot, had loved.

Born November–December 1910. Daughter of Candace Compson. Her father may have been Dalton Ames. Named Quentin before her sex was known and regardless of it. Fatherless nine months before her birth, nameless at birth and already doomed to be unwed from the instant the dividing egg determined its sex. Raised by her grandmother Caroline Compson after Candace was put out on the street by her husband. Cheated by her uncle and guardian Jason Compson (IV) out of the money sent by her mother for her upbringing. Skipped school. Only Luster and her uncle Maury Compson knew that she climbed out of her window down a pear tree each night for rendezvous with boyfriends, while Caroline and Jason believed she was doing homework.

On 7 April 1928, swung herself by a rainpipe from the window of the room in which her uncle had locked her at noon, to the locked window of his own locked and empty bedroom and broke a pane and entered the window and with the uncle’s firepoker burst open the locked bureau drawer and took her uncle’s savings almost seven thousand dollars, four thousand of which from her mother and meant for her and climbed down the same rainpipe in the dusk and ran away with the pitchman who was already under sentence for bigamy. And so vanished; whatever occupation overtook her would have arrived in no chromium Mercedes; whatever snapshot would have contained no general of staff.