The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This icon represents 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 were witnesses of the locomotive raid described by Drusilla Hawk in "Raid." 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 (97). Drusilla's story is based on the actual Andrews Raid, which took place on April 12, 1862, but her version takes several liberties with the facts of the historical incident.

In a passage added to "Raid" as a chapter of The Unvanquished, Drusilla tells Ringo about the race between two railroad trains, one driven by Confederates and the other by Union forces, that rushed past Hawkhurst before the track was destroyed by Yankee troops.

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 (98). Drusilla's story does not describe the Union participants, but her story is an oblique reference to the "blue enemies" living among southerners who had been "oppressed" and "deprived" by the war (97).

A black enslaved person on the Hawk plantation. When Bayard, Ringo, and Rosa Millard stay at Hawkhurst while trying to regain the stolen silver, Ringo sleeps in her cabin. As was often the case, in Faulkner as in southern history, her name apparently has classical roots - Missy Lena is probably a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius and kin to Nero, Caligula, and Augustus who is mentioned in The Town and The Mansion.