The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The story includes an unusual reference to "white women" and "Negroes" (93). The text brings these two groups together as the people in Yoknapatawpha who are equally threatened by the existence of Grumby's gang of "Independents" - though the "white women" are "frightened" while the Negroes are "tortured" (93), and that it's hard to see what place Negro women occupy in this phrasing.

Presumably too "old" to serve in the Confederate army, this group of "old men" once captured Grumby, but released him after he showed them what he claimed was a commission from General Forrest (150).

Grumby is the leader of Grumby's Independents, an irregular group intent on terrorizing the Mississippi countryside. Although Grumby carries a commission allegedly signed by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, suggesting that he is loyal to the Confederacy, in fact he is interested only in wreaking havoc for his and his gang's own gain. He never appears in this story, but the depredations of his gang make his name a source of terror to both the black and the white inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha.

Grumby's "Independents," as they are called, are "about fifty or sixty" men who appeared in Yoknapatawpha after the withdrawal of Union troops (93). They claim to be not unlike the irregular Confederate fighters that Colonel Sartoris leads, but they actually serve only themselves and wage a campaign of terror across the north Mississippi countryside.

"One Negro in the county" was murdered and burned in his cabin by Grumby's Independents (93).

Bayard mentions his Aunt Louisa, who has revealed that Drusilla is fighting in the Civil War with his father, Colonel John Sartoris. Aunt Louisa lives at Hawkhurst, a plantation in Alabama comparable to the Sartoris plantation.

Drusilla is Bayard's cousin. Bayard finds out that she is with his father, Colonel Sartoris, "riding with the troop like she was a man" (93).