Ringo

Character Key Number: 
36
Display Name: 
Ringo
Sort Name: 
Ringo
Parent Character Key: 
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

Ringo - short for Marengo, the name of Napoleon's horse - was born into slavery as a member of the black family that has served the Sartorises for several generations. He appears in all the stories that Bayard Sartoris narrates, as a major character in the seven that were collected in The Unvanquished and a somewhat reduced one in the later "My Grandmother Millard." Even as a slave he occupies an intimate place in the Sartoris family, as both Bayard's personal servant and his friend. He even calls Colonel Sartoris' mother-in-law Rosa "Granny," just like Bayard, a detail that suggests to some readers that he may in fact be an illegitimate child of the Colonel's; however, the stories never acknowledge that possibility, nor, curiously, ever mention his mother. (He is not given a father either, until Faulkner revised "Ambuscade" as the first chapter in The Unvanquished: there Bayard says that Simon is "Ringo's father," 17). According to Bayard, as boys he and Ringo are so close that there is no color line separating them. While this isn't quite true (for example, Ringo serves the white family in the dining room but eats his own meals with his family in the kitchen) the adventures he shares with Bayard during the Civil War do transform the conventional profile of a slave: he helps Bayard, for example, shoot a rifle at a Yankee, and still more transgressively, at another point whips Ab Snopes, a white man, in revenge for Granny's death. Both the Colonel and Bayard acknowledge that Ringo is the "smarter" of the two boys, and his actions as the second-in-command of Granny's non-military campaign against the Union troops in Mississippi display his considerable executive skills. But Ringo is entirely loyal to the Sartoris family and its interests. Even after Emancipation he continues to live at Sartoris, although in a cabin rather than in the mansion that he helps rebuild after the war, and actively participates in the actions taken by the white men of Jefferson to keep other freedmen from voting during Reconstruction. By then the color line between him and Bayard has become impermeable. Ten years after the war, Bayard is studying law at the University of Mississippi, while Ringo remains at Sartoris as a servant of some kind. He is also mentioned by a character in one other text, The Hamlet, though by a racial epithet rather than by name.