Unnamed Confederate Orderly 1

Character Key Number: 
2442
Display Name: 
Unnamed Confederate Orderly 1
Sort Name: 
Unnamed Confederate Orderly 1
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
No
Biography: 

Absalom! mentions the (presumably authoritarian) tone of voice in which Sutpen "used to address his orderly or even his house servants" (149). In this context an "orderly" is a soldier who serves a commanding officer as a kind of servant. Sutpen's "house servants," like nearly all the servants in Faulkner's world, are black, and during the Civil War many Confederate officers took slaves with them to the war, but these are called "body servants" in the fictions, and explicitly racialized as black. So we assume that although Sutpen's orderly's race is not made expllicit, he is white.