Caves in Hills (Location Key)

In both "The Unvanquished" and The Unvanquished Bayard adds a new and perhaps surprising episode to the history of Yoknapatawpha. During the reign of terror that Grumby's gang inflicts upon Yoknapatawpha in the chaos near the end of the Civil War, the group that Bayard refers to as "the Negroes who had lost their white people" - that is, former slaves whose place on the county's plantations has disappeared during the war - "live hidden in caves back in the hills like animals" (93). There are hills both east and west of Jefferson but this is the only reference to these "caves" in the fictions, so we have had to guess where in the county Faulkner imagines them. (Elsewhere in the fictions the enslaved people on various Yoknapatawpha plantations emancipate themselves by leaving when the Union Army moves through the area.) See also the entry for Back in the Hills in this index.