Missy Lena

In The Unvanquished - in a passage added to the original story "Raid" - Ringo sleeps in "Missy Lena's cabin" at Hawkhurst; she is undoubtedly a slave on the plantation, but does not appear in the novel herself (99). If her name was given her by the whites who owned her, as was probably the case, Missy Lena is likely a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; in Faulkner's fiction as in southern history, slave names were often a mock-heroic version of classical ones.