Unnamed Slaves of McCaslins 1

In a passage Faulkner added to "Retreat" when the story was published as a chapter in The Unvanquished, Bayard describes the unconventional way Buck and Buddy treat the large number of enslaved people they inherited from their father. The two white slave-owners move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" (46), and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night. And the white men "had some kind of a system of book-keeping" by which the slaves were given credit for their labor, so that they could in time "earn" their freedom by their "work on the plantation" (48). The narrative suggests the slaves respect these arrangements, although none of them appears in the story as a character. (See also Unnamed Slaves of McCaslins 2.)