StrothersInMGM

After the publication of The Unvanquished Faulkner published one last story in what, without too much exaggeration, could be called the Sartoris-Strothers series. "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Hurricane Creek" (1942) takes place in 1862, chronologically before any of the previous stories. The "battle of Hurricane Creek" is a fiction constructed to allow Philip Backhouse, a member of an old southern family, to change his humiliating last name and marry Melisandre, Granny's niece and so from another old southern family. Intertextually, Faulkner changes two of the Strothers' names as well: Loosh is now called Lucius, and Philadelphy, Philadelphia. As in the first two tales in the series, Lucius proclaims "more than once" that the Yankees are coming (669), and with them will come the fulfillment of his longing for freedom. Both Granny and the story, however, treat his aspirations with a kind of sarcastic contempt. As part of the story's romance plot, Granny sends him in the direction of the war to find the Confederate General Forrest, but instead of using this opportunity to link up with the Union forces, Lucius gets so lost that "he didn't know where he had been" for four days and is benevolently brought back to Sartoris in "one of General Forrest's forage wagons" (690). Ringo is reduced to the role of supporting player. Louvinia is explicitly referred to as "Mammy" (687). Early in the tale a group of renegade Yankee soldiers do attack Sartoris, destroying the "back house" (676) - that is, the "outhouse" or "privy" behind the big house (675). But when the story ends with Granny ordering Louvinia to "call Joby and Lucius" to her, it's clear that the old plantation, and the roles it establishes for the Strothers, remain intact (699).