Emerging from a poor, uneducated, white family in Virginia, Sutpen became rich in the West Indies and later establishes a plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, outside of the fictional Jefferson, Mississippi. Marrying an upstanding local store owner's daughter, Ellen Coldfield, Sutpen becomes somewhat respectable and has two children, Henry and Judith. Sutpen's past, however, comes back to tear apart his family. Sutpen had a wife and son in Haiti, only to repudiate them after he learned his wife had some black ancestry.
Charles Bon, the Haitian son, becomes friends with Henry at college, and he comes to the Sutpen home one Christmas as his guest. Bon becomes engaged to Judith, but it is unclear if he knows who Sutpen really is. Henry rejects his father after Sutpen tells him about Bon the following Christmas. After serving together for four years in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, Henry kills his half-brother after learning about his black ancestry—more distressed that his sister might marry a black man than he is at the prospect of her marrying a close relative—and then runs away.
His wife already dead, Sutpen becomes desperate for another male heir, and he offers to marry Rosa, his former sister-in-law, if she produces a son with him first.
