In Faulkner’s book, The Unvanquished, we are introduced to a cast of characters who entirely unconventional in terms of the time period in which the stories take place. The dynamics that are seen between the Sartoris family and Ringo is specifically unexpected, and reminds me a bit of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic– Bayard and Granny are so dependent on Ringo, that they are practically slave to him.

We can see Bayard’s dependence on Ringo in the first story, Ambuscade, when Bayard uses Ringo to balance the musket and shoot at the soldier watching the house. “…the musket was already riding up across Ringo’s back as he stooped.” (26) Bayard was too weak to carry and shoot the musket on his own, and he therefor relied on Ringo to shoulder the burden of the attempted murder. This burden was not just physical–the musket was not just heavy– rather, had Bayard actually succeeded in killing the soldier, he would have depended on Ringo to take on half the burden. Bayard may feel this way because Ringo is more intelligent than him, and therefor, he would have been able to quickly think of a way out of the mess that they had gotten into.

Although this may be the case, Bayard does not want to imagine that his relationship with Ringo is so interdependent. While he acknowledges the superiority of Ringo’s intellect, he also feels that this difference between them is meaningless–as meaningless as the color of their skin. Obviously this is not the case. Intellectual superiority is most definitely not meaningless, and neither was skin color in Mississippi during the mid-1800s. However, by Bayard imagining that him and Ringo are on the same stature, he can also imagine that he is not nearly as dependent on Ringo as he truly is.

The occasion with the musket was not the only time that a Sartois depended on Ringo. They leaned on and relied on him many times, especially in terms of writing, a tool that he developed and taught himself. During the horse scam, Ringo was the one who wrote the orders for the horses. This gave Ringo, a slave, the delusion that he had an unconventional amount of power. However, while he was the one writing the orders, he was only playing the role of a white man, and only playing the role of someone who had enough power to write and give orders. He was not an author, but merely an actor with a script. Additionally, while Granny allowed Ringo to be deluded as such, and have a say in the happenings of the scam, she also believed in the strict hierarchical structure which made Ringo, despite his obvious skills, on a lower pedestal than her. As a woman in the south, there were not many people that Granny was superior to, despite her skin color. She therefor needed to assert her dominance as best as she could, and put Ringo down, in as subtle a way as possible. Which is why when Ringo referred to Ab Snopes, a white nobody by his first name, Granny needed to correct him, and tell him to refer to him properly. While she may have put Ab above Ringo in this manner (thus putting herself above him to), only moments after correcting him, Ringo went to get the ink to write another order for mules.

Granny herself was rather unconventional as well. As mentioned, white women did not have much power during that time. Despite this, Granny had an incredible amount of pull. She was intelligent, shrewd, and fairly powerful. In a sense, I feel as though Granny is Faulkner’s white Julius. Both Granny and Julius do things out of self interest and benefit. They were both masters in the arts of scamming–Granny, when she scammed the Yankees into giving her money, and Julius, when he scammed John and Annie into getting his way. Because of the little power that they each had, both Granny and Julius needed to use secondary things or people in order to get their ways. Julius did this through the use of his stories, and Granny did this by using the boys as tools to get what she wanted. Additionally, they were both incredibly superstitious. Julius was a believer (or at least, a fake believer,) of folklore, which helped him in his scams. Granny hid the chest and was exceptionally paranoid based on her superstitions, and the dreams that she had, which worked to her benefit as well.