The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Gavin Breckbridge was engaged to Drusilla before the Civil War, which means it is almost certain that he belonged to the upper class. He never appears directly in Faulkner's fiction, but his death while fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 marks the moment when Drusilla "deliberately tried to unsex herself" (189).

One of the more memorable women in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, Drusilla Hawk was born into the plantation aristocracy, where her role as a lady seemed clearly defined - until the Civil War gave her the opportunity to redefine it. After her father and fiance are killed at the Battle of Shiloh, she "deliberately tries to unsex" herself (189), according to her appalled mother, by refusing to mourn them and instead joining the Confederate unit led by her cousin, John Sartoris, in the fighting.

Jingus is a slave of the Hawks, who live in his cabin after their main house was burned down by Union troops. On Bayard's previous visit to Hawkhurst, Jingus showed him the railroad. It is not known if he is still at Hawkhurst at the time of this visit, or if, like numerous other Negroes in the novel who emancipate themselves, he has decided to follow the Union army when it moves on.

Louisa Hawk - Bayard's Aunt Louisa - lives with her son Denny and daughter Drusilla at Hawkhurst in Alabama. She would call herself (to quote from her letter to her sister Rosa Millard) "the widow of a lost cause," which, she might add, is "the highest destiny of a Southern woman" (191). Her husband was killed while serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

When the reader first encounter Denny Hawk he is ten years old. He is Drusilla's brother and Bayard's cousin and lives at his family's plantation, Hawkhurst, in Alabama. He shares his cousin's fascination with the railroad. By the end of the novel, several years later, he has gotten married and reads law in Montgomery, Alabama.

A self-emancipated woman whom the Sartoris party encounters along the road. Tellingly, she remains silent when Mrs. Millard asks "Who do you belong to?" (84). She has already embodied her freedom as granted by the Emancipation Proclamation. The child she is carrying, described as "a baby, a few months old, has a separate entry " (84).

Along the road to Hawkhurst and during the night Bayard spends there, many groups of self-emancipated slaves pass by on their way toward the Union army, freedom, and what one former slave calls "Jordan" (85), in an allusion to both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dustcloud" on the road (82); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (83). Several times Bayard also says he could "smell them" (83).

After Union troops burned their big houses, the women and children that Bayard sees along the road now live, like his grandmother and him, in cabins that were once used by their slaves.

This company of Union cavalry storms the Sartoris plantation looking for John Sartoris. After he escapes, they dig up the buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

This is the soldier who misses capturing John Sartoris in the barn, and who then points his "carbine" directly at the two boys, Bayard and Ringo, "and shot at us pointblank" (73). He misses them too.