The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

didn’t count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us was to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognise it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolised it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, ‘This is what we will find’; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they dont know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.
    We went on; we didn’t go fast. Or maybe it seemed slow because we had got into a country where nobody seemed to live at all; all that day we didn’t even see a house. I didn’t ask and Granny didn’t say; she just satthere under the parasol with Mrs Compson’s hat on and the horses walking and even our own dust moving ahead of us; after a while even Ringo sat up and looked around. “We on the wrong road,” he said. “Aint even nobody live here, let alone pass here.”
    But after a while the hills stopped, the road ran out flat and straight and all of a sudden Ringo hollered, “Look out! Here they come again to git these uns!” We saw it too then, a cloud of dust away to the west, moving slow, too slow for men riding, and then the road we were on ran square into a big broad one running straight on into the east as the railroad at Hawkhurst did when Granny and I were there that Christmas before the War; all of a sudden I remembered it.
    “This is the road to Hawkhurst,” I said. But Ringo was not listening; he was looking at the dust, and the wagon stopped now in the road with the horses’ heads hanging and our dust overtaking us again and the big dustcloud coming slow up in the west.
    “Cant you see um coming?” Ringo hollered. “Git on away from here!”
    “They aint Yankees,” Granny said. “The Yankees have already been here.” Then we saw it too: a burned house like ours; three chimneys standing above a mound of ashes and then we saw a white woman and a child looking at us from a cabin behind them. Granny looked at the dustcloud, then she looked at the empty broad road going on into the east. “This is the way,” she said.
    We went on. It seemed like we went slower than ever now, with the dustcloud behind us and the burnedhouses and gins and thrown down fences on either side and the white women and children—we never saw a nigger at all—watching us from the nigger cabins where they lived now like we lived at home; we didn’t stop. “Poor folks,” Granny said. “I wish we had enough to share with them.”
    At sunset we drew off the road and camped; Ringo was looking back. “Whatever hit is, we done went off and left hit,” he said. “I dont see no dust.” We slept in the wagon this time, all three of us; I dont know what time it was, only that all of a sudden I was awake. Granny was already sitting up in the wagon, I could see her head against the branches and the stars; all of a sudden all three of us were sitting up in the wagon, listening. They were coming up the road. It sounded like about fifty of them; we could hear the feet hurrying, and a kind of panting murmur. It was not singing exactly, it was not that loud; it was just a sound, a breathing, a kind of gasping murmuring