Unnamed Americans

At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115). The intent here is obviously to suggest a United States fully united and strong in the face of the external enemies they had to fight during World War II, but there is no indication in the text that the narrator, or Faulkner, includes the millions of non-white Americans who lived in the north and south and east and west in this entity, and so, although the "deeds" that created the country were accomplished by people of all races, our decision to identify this group as "White" seems the most accurate way to represent the text.