![]() ![]() ![]() Although she dresses elegantly, she lives in a decayed house at the edge of town with a pair of black servants. ![]() Miss Habersham is an elderly lady, a member of the oldest family in Yoknapatawpha County. Vinson himself is the only member of the family to have any business sense, and actually has both money in the bank and some property at the time of his death. His family, the Gowrie clan, is considered the worst and most criminal group in Beat Four. Vinson Gowrie is the man Lucas Beauchamp is supposed to have murdered. He is a classic denizen of Beat Four, living with his children alone on a piece of land from which they together pursue professions that are either marginal or outright illegal. He is missing an arm, but nevertheless pulls a gun on the sheriff during the official exhumation. Nub Gowrie is the father of the Gowrie boys, Vinson and Crawford. He enters the plot late in the novel, and not much is revealed about his personality-except that he would have to be vicious in the extreme to behave as he does. He seems, therefore, an unusual person-secretly opposed to lynching and other racial violence.Ĭrawford Gowrie is the murderer of both his brother Vinson and Jake Montgomery. After the murder, he saves Beauchamp yet again, keeping the crowd at bay until the constable arrives to take Beauchamp into custody. He had saved Lucas Beauchamp during an earlier fight with the locals. He gives the young Chick a crucial piece of advice about how women and children are better than men at doing uncommon things.įraser is the son of the proprietor of the country store where the murder takes place. Chick had not, until then, understood that a black person was capable of such emotion.Įdmonds is the landowner on whose property Lucas Beauchamp lives he is a friend of Gavin Stevens, Chick’s uncle, and now owns the two thousand-acre plantation founded by the patriarch Carothers McCaslin before the Civil War.Įphraim is Paralee’s father, and has died by the time the central action of the novel takes place. Faulkner describes her as a ‘‘tiny, doll-like woman.’’ She dies not long afterward, and when Chick next sees Lucas Beauchamp, he realizes Lucas is grieving. Molly is Lucas Beauchamp’s wife, who feeds Chick after he falls in the creek at the beginning of the story. This may be one reason the white residents of Beat Four are so eager to lynch him, and even seem intent on burning him alive (hence, the frequent references Faulkner makes to the lynch mobs carrying gasoline). Faulkner describes his face as ‘‘not arrogant, not even scornful: just intractable and composed.’’ For years, the county, it seems, has been waiting to teach him a lesson and put him in his place as a subordinate within this segregated culture. This is a dangerous trait for a black man in the South of the 1940s. Beauchamp is self-assured to the point that he seems contemptuous of all who meet him. The black owner of a small cabin and farm on the Edmonds estate, Beauchamp is in fact a direct descendent of Carothers McCaslin, who founded the estate long ago. Although still vigorous, he is in his seventies as the story takes place. Lucas Beauchamp is one of the central characters in the novel, the man accused of murdering Vinson Gowrie. ![]()
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