The multi-generational, racially complex family that Thomas Sutpen begets - five children with four different women - is at the center of one of Faulkner's major novels: Absalom, Absalom! (1936), where Faulkner uses it to explore the problematic history of the Old South and its racial legacy. Sutpen himself arrives in Yoknapatawpha in the early 1830s; Requiem for a Nun lists him along with the county's oldest, most prominent, upper class white families: "Sartoris and Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen" (8).
According to Mr. Compson, Clytemnestra's mother is one of the two women among the twenty slaves that Sutpen brought with him to Yoknapatawpha. There seems no narrative reason to doubt that Sutpen is the white man who fathers Clytemnestra, though none of the novel's narrative sources provide any direct evidence of that - nor indeed do any of them provide any additional details about this woman.
According to Mr. Compson in Absalom! Clytemnestra's mother is one of the two women among the twenty slaves that Sutpen brought with him to Yoknapatawpha. The novel does not describe her, nor try to represent the relationship between her and Sutpen, the white man who claims to own her.
In the very beginning, Faulkner was going to create a novel about the Snopeses, but after starting that his imagination was taken over instead by the Sartorises. If the poor-white but upwardly mobile Snopeses represent what Faulkner found wrong with the "new," 20th century South, the culturally dispossessed, aristocratic Sartorises can be seen, at least at first, as a kind of monument to the greatness of the Old South, and a Modernist symbol of loss, like the exiled Russian aristocrat Marie with whom T.S. Eliot begins The Waste Land.
When Faulkner gathered the six short stories Bayard narrates, along with a seventh that he had not been able to sell, into a novel, he made a number of revisions that significantly effect the story of the Strothers family. Early in "Ambuscade" as the novel's first chapter, he clears up some of the potential ambiguity about Ringo's place on the Strothers family tree by specifying that Ringo is Simon's son and Louvinia's grandson - though still novel still makes no mention of Ringo's mother, except when Bayard says both he and Ringo nursed at same breast.
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.
Loosh and Philadelphy are only mentioned in this story, and Joby and Louvinia only appear at the beginning and end; Louvinia's desire for Granny to bring Loosh back, however, even though it includes the request for Granny to "whup him" first, is the genuine expression of motherly concern (38). Most of the tale takes place away from Sartoris, as Granny and the two boys - the white Bayard and the black Ringo - follow the Union army in pursuit of their lost property (which includes Loosh and Philadelphy).
This story takes place shortly after the South surrenders, ending both the Civil War and slavery. Not even this last event, however, changes the ways (physical and emotional) that Joby's family continues to serve the Sartoris family. Louvinia, for example, takes Drusilla "in her arms" and consoles her "like she used to hold [Bayard]" when he was a child after Drusilla is mortified by the ladies of Jefferson (65).
This is the first of the three Unvanquished stories that Faulkner published after the publication of Absalom! Ringo is the only member of the family to play a substantial role. For example, Loosh appears only when Bayard compares the poor people of Yoknapatawpha looking at Granny to the way the hounds used to look at Loosh when he went into their kennels to feed them (85).
Ringo is removed almost entirely from the context of his family as his character continues to outgrow the conventional boundaries for slaves and other blacks in both Faulkner's fiction and cultural stereotypes. During his and Bayard's pursuit of the men responsible for killing Granny at the end of "The Unvanquished," Ringo helps Uncle Buck tie Ab Snopes - a Snopes but still a white man - to a tree, and it is Ringo who whips him (109).
