William Faulkner cribs the family tree

When I was in high school in New York, my favorite book was The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's Nobel Prize winning novel about a disintegrating Southern family. Twenty years later, I married a Southern man and moved to Alabama. My husband often told me about his father's side of the family who had lived in Tennessee. The story was colorful and sad. His great grandmother, Mamaw, was left widowed with six young children after her husband was shot by a neighbor in a border dispute over one of his five farms. A sepia toned photo of Mamaw and her children, all smiling grimly in their Sunday best, hangs in our den. Before the children were grown, the money was gone, and the once proud family declined with alcoholism, bootlegging, gambling, bribery, murder, and incest just like the families in Faulkner's books. Ten years ago, my husband's cousin who dabbled in genealogy, discovered we might be related to William Faulkner's mother through Mamaw. Both women shared the same maiden name, Butler, and they had lived in the same small Mississippi town at the same time. But since there was no proof, I thought it was interesting but nothing to get excited about. Two years later, my husband's mother fell ill, and we hired a nurse to help us care for her at home. One day, the nurse asked me about my husband's family, and I told her the sad story, I then showed her Mamaw's photo and mentioned the possible connection to William Faulkner's family. The nurse's eyes widened with surprise. "I don't believe it," she said, "My very next patient, Suzanne Falkner, is the widow of William Faulkner's brother, Murray. I'm going to check on her after I leave you today. She lives down the street from you, less than half a mile away." The nurse asked to borrow the photo so she could show it to her patient. Frankly, I wasn't expecting anything to come of it. So I was astonished when the nurse told me Suzanne Falkner took one look at the photo and ordered the nurse into the living room. There hanging on the wall was the very same photo of Mamaw and her six children. I thought the nurse might be pulling my leg until I looked in the phone book and confirmed that Suzanne Falkner did indeed live just a few blocks away. Unfortunately, Mrs. Falkner was too ill for me to call or visit. But I eventually found an out of print book her husband Murray Falkner had written about his family, The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir. The book stated his mother had given Suzanne all the family memorabilia before she died. It's impossible to know how that photo of Mamaw and her children made its way to William Faulkner's mother. Were the families related through the Butler line? And more importantly, did Faulkner's mother tell her son about Mamaw, the border dispute, and the family's decline? Did any of these tragic details make their way into The Sound and The Fury or inspire any of William Faulkner's other books. I'll never know, but the possibilities are intriguing.