The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"The cabin," as it is called in the story, was originally built behind the plantation's big house as part of the slave quarters. Now, however, the masters live there too: Granny and Bayard moved in there after the Sartoris mansion was burned in "Retreat." In "Raid," Bayard explains that "We lived in Joby's cabin then, with a red quilt nailed by one edge to a rafter and hanging down to make two rooms" (37-38). This arrangement seems still be in place in "Vendee" as Louvinia greets them at the door and the boys go to bed "on the pallet" (116).

This desolate hideout of Grumby and his gang is where, in "The Unvanquished," Rosa (Granny) Millard was killed. According to that story, it is "a huge rotting building" "located on the Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away" from the Sartoris Plantation (94). In order to get there, Granny walks from the crossroads where Ringo and Bayard wait in the wagon: "The crossroads was a not a road any more; it was no more than a faint gash turning off at right angles into the bottom, so that it looked like a cave" (95).

Further along on the "old road along the river bottom," at a spot where a house had once stood, Bayard and Ringo come upon an "old Negro man" whom Grumby's gang has lynched and left as a warning to the boys (110).

This haystack beside the "dim road along the river bottom" is the place where Ringo and Bayard sleep on the last night on their chase of Grumby and his men (110).

A slough is a narrow, shallow inlet or pond, usually in swampy terrain. This slough is where, after seeing a frozen water mocassin, they find Ab Snopes, where they have to burn "Ringo's stick," where Ringo (legally still a 'slave') whips Ab Snopes (legally a 'white' man), and where Uncle Buck leaves them to return to Jefferson with Ab (110).

While chasing Grumby and his men, Bayard, Ringo and Uncle Buck come across a house the gang has burned "where the ashes were still smoking," and a "woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth" and a boy "still unconscious in the stable" (102). Bayard later mentions that this was "in Alabama" (114). Alabama also figures in the story as the place where the pursuers are consistently (mis)directed to look for Grumby, first by Ab Snopes's wife and then by Matt Bowden.

The pursuers meet Matt Bowden for the first time at their campfire beside a "cotton pen where we were going to sleep" (103). This most likely refers to a rudimentary shed that was used to store cotton after picking; elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction such structures are called "cotton houses."