In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished the first "Yankee" Bayard and Ringo ever see is the Union soldier they shoot at. They don't get a close enough look at him first to describe him in any detail, but Bayard does remember thinking - with some surprise - that "he looks just like a man" (10). When he passes the site of the shooting in "Retreat," the next story in the series, Bayard remembers him briefly.
In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this is the officer in command of the Confederate cavalrymen who warns Granny that she should turn back because "the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols" (24, 56). He apologizes for saying "hell" in her presence, and is chivalrous enough to offer her "an escort" when she insists on going on (24, 56).
In Light in August this is the smaller party of Confederate soldiers who, after their unit's successful raid on Union supplies in Jefferson, turn back to raid a henhouse; it includes Hightower's grandfather.
In Light in August this is the troop of Confederate cavalry under the command of General Van Dorn to which Hightower's grandfather belonged. During the Civil War it rode into Jefferson and destroyed a Union supply depot, after which most of them rode away. (This event that Hightower is obsessed with is adapted by Faulkner from an actual raid that occurred in 1862 in Holly Springs, a Mississippi town near Oxford.)
In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished this cavalry unit of indeterminate size stops to talk with Granny and her party on "the third night" of their journey toward Memphis (23, 56).
In terms of the issue of race, one of the most promising moments in Faulkner's fiction - at least from a 21st century point of view - is when in the first chapter of The Unvanquished Bayard Sartoris suggests he and Ringo have transcended the color line that is carved so deeply into the segregated real world that Faulkner and mythical Yoknapatawpha inhabit, although it has to be noted that even as Bayard asserts that possibility, his language belies the promise: "maybe he wasn't a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore." Ringo is the only Strother mentioned in The
One of the Chickasaws in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun wears a "foxhorn" around his neck which Compson blows to call in "his men" from the search for the missing lock (210, 16).
One of the Chickasaws wears a "foxhorn" around his neck which Compson blows to call in "his men" from the search for the missing lock (16). (It seems very anachronistic to associate Indians on the American frontier in the 1820s or 30s with the imported conventions of fox hunting, but in the earlier Indian tale "Red Leaves" Faulkner describes the way Mississippi Indians adopted elements of European civilization.)
The narrator of Sanctuary doesn't say how he knows this young woman carrying an infant on the train is a "countrywoman" (170), but he displays sympathy for the fact that she is forced to stand while the college students occupy the seats in the railway car.
In Flags in the Dust this unnamed woman is pregnant again when she moves from the countryside into Jefferson with her husband and two children. When her husband is drafted and shipped overseas, she is helped by the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow.
