The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Along with her husband Joby, Louvinia is at the head of the family that has served the Sartorises for many years. In this story she presides over the homecoming of Bayard and Ringo after the grueling ordeal in which they get revenge for Rosa's death. Bayard describes her "crying and praying and pawing at me, and hollering and scolding at [her grandson] Ringo all at once" (116). After she cooks supper for the boys, Bayard falls asleep "with Louvinia's face hanging over us" (116).

Describing the hidden pen that Ab Snopes built, Bayard says it is "like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home" (100). This is the only time anyone called "Yance" appears in the fictions, and it seems likely that Faulkner meant Joby or Loosh, both of whom work on the pen in earlier stories in the series. (When he reprinted this story as a chapter in The Unvanquished, he changed the name "Yance" to "Joby.")

Colonel John Sartoris is the patriarch of the Sartoris family, and one of the major figures in the Yoknapatawpha fiction. For almost all of "Vendee" he is away from the county fighting Yankees. When Bayard and Ringo have avenged Rosa's death, they learn that along with his cousin Drusilla he has returned and that the war is over. With his "hard" hands he is hugging the boys at the very end of the story (116).

What Bayard first sees as a "thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb" is quickly and chillingly recognized as the body of "an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet" (111). Grumby has apparently lynched him to serve as a graphic warning to the boys: pinned to his corpse is a badly written note telling them to "Turn back" (111).

"Uncle Buck" is the first man to arrive at Granny's funeral, and afterward he insists on accompanying Bayard and Ringo on their quest for vengeance. He is profane, testy from his rheumatism, but indefatigable on the outlaws' trail, giving up the quest only after being shot in his bad arm. "Uncle" is a courtesy title for Buck, but in this story he does serve as a kind of surrogate father for Bayard.

Ab Snopes is the founding father of the Snopes family as this prolific clan appears in Faulkner's later Yoknapatawpha fictions. In The Unvanquished stories he is allied with Rosa Millard in the scheme to defraud the Yankee army, but becomes Bayard and Ringo's enemy in the story "The Unvanquished" after indirectly causing her death at Grumby's hands. In "Vendee" he has joined Grumby's gang, though they deliver him to Bayard, Ringo and Buck McCaslin in an attempt to head off their pursuit. The gang's obvious contempt for him is shared by the narrative.

This man is simply described by Bayard as "a town nigger holding an umbrella" over the big preacher from Memphis (97). His status as a "town" Negro distinguishes him from the many "niggers" who have come to Rosa Millard's funeral from the hills outside of Jefferson (97).

"Refugeeing" was a Civil War term for white Southerners who fled from areas of fighting into regions that were presumed to be safer. Bayard says that this minister is "from Memphis or somewhere," and describes him as a "big refugeeing preacher with his book already open, and a town nigger holding an umbrella over him" (97). Mrs. Compson and other Jefferson townspeople have asked him to officiate at Granny's funeral, presumably because of her status as both an Episcopalian and a member of the local aristocracy.

Bayard distinguishes the "town people" who attend Granny's funeral from the "hill people" who are there as well. They include Mrs. Compson, who is one of the townspeople who arrange for the Episcopal preacher from Memphis to officiate at the funeral and who offer Bayard and Ringo a home until Colonel Sartoris returns from the fight. These people stand under umbrellas and get out of the way of Fortinbride and the hill people who bury Granny.

Ringo, the same age as Bayard Sartoris, is both Bayard's slave and his constant childhood companion; although no text ever says so, the fact that he too calls Rosa Millard "Granny" suggests the possibility that he might be Bayard's half-brother. In this story, Ringo is Bayard's partner in the quest for vengeance for Granny's death. Along the way Uncle Buck regularly refers to him as "that nigger" rather than by name (99, 102), but Buck does not object when, in a surprising and unstereotypical scene, Ringo whips the white man Ab Snopes (after pointedly calling him "Mr." Ab Snopes, 109).