Louvinia

Born into slavery, Louvinia appears in two novels and seven stories as the cook at the Sartoris plantation and, along with her husband Joby, the head of the enslaved family that serves the Sartorises over many generations. When we first meet her, in the story Will Falls tells in Flags in the Dust about the day the Yankees arrived at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, Louvinia is "shellin' a bowl of peas fer supper" (20); she helps her master escape out the back door. She plays a larger part in the Unvanquished stories about the plantation during the Civil War that John's son Bayard narrates. As the mother of Loosh, the one member of her family who rebels against his enslavement, she tries to protect him from his own anger, and after he follows the Union army toward freedom she pleads with Rosa Millard in "Raid" to "whup him" until he agrees to come back home (38). But she also 'mothers' Bayard and Ringo, her grandson, and in "Skirmish at Sartoris" emotionally consoles another member of the white family she continues to serve, even after the abolition of slavery: "holding Drusilla in her arms," Bayard writes, "like she used to hold me" (65). She even takes charge of Rosa once, holding her to keep her from confronting the Yankees who are sacking the plantation. Louvinia is still in the kitchen at Sartoris ten years later, when we see her for the last time in The Unvanquished (242).