The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Dennison Hawk was Rosa Millard's brother-in-law and Drusilla's and Denny's father. After his death at the Battle of Shiloh he is buried in the family graveyard at Hawkhurst.

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?" (41). She has already embodied her freedom as granted by the Emancipation Proclamation. The child she is carrying - "a baby, a few months old" - has a separate entry (41).

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" (41), in an allusion to both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40). Several times Bayard also says he could "smell them" (40).

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 story only mentions "Uncle Buck McCaslin," when Bayard recalls the way the old man had "acted" in "Retreat," the previous story in the series. In the collective Yoknapatawpha fictions, the McCaslins are planters who were among the first white settlers of Yoknapatawtpha, and their story is at the center of the later novel Go Down, Moses. Buck's first appearances in print, however, give no sense of that.

Loosh is Joby's and Louvinia's son, and Ringo's uncle. In the earlier story "Retreat," Loosh leaves the Sartoris plantation after showing Union troops where the white family has buried their silver. Both Louvinia and Rosa Millard expect Loosh will be found at the end of Rosa's journey and that he will come back to the plantation with her.

Joby, the oldest of the enslaves family that has served the Sartorises for a long time, plays a minor role in this story because Rosa Millard does not take him - or the useless barrel of "the musket" that he tries to put in the wagon - when she leaves Sartoris in pursuit of the Union army and the Sartoris silver (38).

"Raid" includes a number of Union soldiers, individually and in units, some identified by name. But this icon represents the "Yankees" who are not seen directly, the various units who have been destroying railroads and burning plantations across Mississippi and Alabama, including the Sartoris place and Hawkhurst. They are represented in the text by the ruins they have left behind them.

Colonel Dick is a Union cavalryman with a "bright beard" and "hard bright eyes" (52). When his troop came to Satoris looking for Colonel John, he impressed Rosa Millard with his gentlemanly behavior, as recounted in the short story "Ambuscade." Knowing she can trust him, in this story she seeks his help in retrieving the silver and mules that a different Union unit has confiscated. Once again he is helpful to her cause.

Like her husband Joby, Louvinia stays at Sartoris for most of this story about Rosa's quest to retrieve the Sartoris family silver from the Yankee army. For Louvinia, however, the most important goal of Rosa's trip should be "getting" her son Loosh "back" (38).