The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This Sergeant in the Union cavalry unit Rosa Millard encounters in Alabama objects to his young Lieutenant's decision to honor the requisition she carries.

Back in Alabama Rosa Millard and her group run into a Union cavalry unit led by a lieutenant who, Bayard says, "didn't look much older than Ringo and me," sounds "like a girl" when he swears, and looks as if he's "fixing to cry" when forced to turn over his troop's horses to her (116-7).

Captain Bowen is in charge of the Union cavalry troop which Rosa, Bayard, and Ringo encounter on their way back home. One of his lieutenants says that the Captain mounted them with captured stock.

The outfit of gullible Union soldiers who are riding through the countryside in Alabama when Ringo stops them in order to requisition additional property.

This troop of cavalry is camped out at the river ford about twenty miles from the narrative's central river crossing site.

The officer in command of the cavalry troop Rosa Millard encounters at the ford across the river is not named, but is clearly identified as "a heavy-built man with a red face" (113). We get a good idea why he looks choleric when he reads the Rosa's requisition order and swears - behavior that suggests a lower class origin than the officers, Yankee as well as Confederate, elsewhere in the fictions.

This icon represents the large group of Negroes who sought freedom with the Union army but who are turned over to Rosa Millard because of a clerical error. They are part of a much larger group of self-emancipated slaves, to Bayard it "looks like a thousand" (110), who are waiting beside the pile of confiscated chests and the pen full of confiscated mules when Rosa Millard presents the faulty requisition order that calls for "110 Negroes of both sexes" to be "repossessed" to her (112). She is actually given over well over two hundred Negroes by the army, who seem anxious to be rid of them.

This sergeant is in charge of the depot at the Union camp where the confiscated silver and mules are kept, along with the self-emancipated Negroes who managed to cross the river.

This anonymous Lieutenant executes the erroneous order of the General authorizing Rosa Millard to receive 10 chests of silver, 110 mules and 110 "Negroes of both sexes" (112); he adds an "another hundred" Negroes with the "compliments" of the commanding general.

The orderly or clerk who writes out the requisition for Rosa Millard's silver, mules and Negroes. Apparently he has a hard time understanding her southern accent.