The Unvanquished features many depictions of masses of emancipated slaves simply moving as the Confederate army in MS and AL collapses and slaves begin following in the wake of Union troops as they burned their way through the South, culminating in General Sherman’s 1864-5 “March to the Sea.” This is an important part of the history of the Civil War and its aftermath, as formerly enslaved people followed Union forces to escape their masters in some cases and enjoyed the intoxicating freedom of escaping their spatial entrapment within plantations to explore, to visit family and friends, or simply to move.

Faulkner’s text represents this complex web of desires and movements rather reductively, figuring freedmen as a faceless mass (almost zombie-like) motivated in lock-step by the figure of the “Jordan.” This, too, has its roots in history, as slave culture developed a creative reading of the Old Testament in which enslaved African-Americans were the Jews in the desert and white plantation owners were the Pharoah. Many of the “sorrow songs” focus on this narrative, and one can easily imaging that the songs referenced in the text would have been, for example, “Roll, Jordan, Roll” or “Go Down, Moses” (which Faulkner used as the title for his 1942 story cycle we’ll read in a few weeks). Here’s a taste: