Philadelphy

Philadelphy - almost certainly a corruption of "Philadelphia," the name she has in "My Grandmother Millard" (668) - is, like her husband Loosh, a slave on the Sartoris plantation. She is what is sometimes called a 'house slave,' i.e. one of the slaves who work inside the white family's mansion rather than in the cotton fields. We see her serving as a maid in "My Grandmother Millard," which Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after The Unvanquished was published. But Philadelphy's essential role the two Unvanquished stories in which she appears is to try to resist Loosh's desire for freedom. "I tried to stop him, Miss Rosa," she tells her mistress three times in "Retreat" (35); she agrees with Rosa that following the Union army will only lead them "into misery and starvation," but goes because "he my husband" (35). While she's away with him, her name appears in "Raid" as a source of miscommunication when a Yankee soldier mistakes it for the name of a town in Mississippi (Philadelphia). Loosh has returned to Sartoris by the end of The Unvanquished, but after she "went on" with him at the end of "Retreat," Philadelphia is not mentioned again.