StrothersInH

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 Hamlet, Faulkner's very next novel. And the only reference to him in that text says even more unambiguously - though by way of the particularly Faulknerian trope of absence, of what's not there - how difficult it is to escape the terms of white supremacy. V.K. Ratliff is describing Ab Snopes' experience "during the War"; after Ab was implicated in Grumby's murder of Rosa Millard, he was tracked down and punished by "Colonel's boy Bayard and Uncle Buck McCaslin and a nigger" (32). Although all this happened before Ratliff was born, he gets right the names of all five of the white people involved - while the one black person is reduced to that dehumanizing epithet.