Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2015-05-02 19:03
Consisting of "the old men and the women and the children," and the blacks who were present in the earlier story "The Unvanquished" and "a hundred more besides" (97), this group of unnamed mourners attend Granny's funeral. Bayard consistently refers to them as "hill people" to distinguish them from Jefferson townspeople. In particular the "hill men with crockersacks tied over their heads" to shelter them from the rain are contrasted with the "town men with umbrellas" (98).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2015-05-02 18:55
"Brother" Fortinbride first appears in "The Unvanquished," the story that precedes "Vendee" in the series that became The Unvanquished. In the earlier story readers learn that he was a private in Sartoris' regiment until he was seriously wounded in battle at the start of the Civil War. Back in Yoknapatawpha, though a farmer and a Methodist, he conducts the irregular Episcopal services at which Rosa distributes money and mules to the county's poor. He continues in that role in "Vendee" as the no-nonsense officiant at Rosa's funeral.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2015-05-02 18:48
Mrs. Compson is the wife of General Compson (and so one of the grandmothers of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury). In this story she helps arrange for Granny's funeral by inviting a big preacher from Memphis to officiate and then invites Bayard and Ringo to "come home and live with her" until Bayard's father returns from the war (98).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2015-05-02 18:38
This fifth Unvanquished story, begins immediately after Rosa Millard's death in "The Unvanquished." Although Granny - as Bayard calls her - is being buried when it begins, she remains powerful in her absence: "Vendee" is about the quest undertaken by Bayard and Ringo, the slave who also called her Granny, to get revenge on Grumby, the man who murdered her.
Bayard compares the way Grumby's body collapses on him after being shot to "the balloon [Granny] saw in St. Louis" (114). (The first flights in hot air balloons took place in France at the end of the 18th century. By 1793 they were in the U.S.)
The first time Bayard, Ringo and Uncle Buck meet Matt Bowden, he tells them he is a plantation owner from Tennessee (104). There is no reason, however, to believe him.
Borneo, off the coast of southeast Asia, is the third largest island in the world. It becomes part of the story because, in a passage from the typescript that Joseph Blotner restores to the text of "Vendee" he publishes in Uncollected Stories, Bayard mentions "a book at home about Borneo" as his reference for skinning someone like Grumby (115).
Borneo is a large island nation off the coast of southeast Asia that plays a small and very marginal role in the Yoknapatawpha fictions because of its fabled, not to say stereotypical association with head-hunting. In Absalom! this connection provides a metaphorical point-of-reference: Clytemnestra's "body just grew smaller and smaller like something being shrunk in a furnace, like the Bornese do their captured heads" (175).
The place where Bayard and Ringo finally catch up with Grumby is not described in much detail. It is on the old road through the river bottom, and surrounded by "bushes" (111).
