The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In his anguished reflection on the way he ran away after his grandfather's death, Bayard reminds himself that "You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you" (333). This is all we learn about the man.

The only detail about Virginius' father that the narrative provides - that he gave his son a mule when he first got married - establishes the lower class origins of the MacCallum family.

The narrative says very little about Virginius' deceased second wife, except that she was the mother of Buddy, the youngest son, whose "hazel eyes and reddish thatch" of hair were inherited from her (354).

The first of the two wives of Virginius MacCallum had a dowry comprised of a clock and "a dressed hog" (332). The narrative does not mention anything else about her, but what it says later about the second wife - Buddy's mother, from whom he gets his coloring - suggests this wife was the mother of Virginius' five other sons: unlike Buddy, for instance, they all have "brown eyes and black hair" (354).

Bayard Sartoris is the narrator of "The Unvanquished." Having spent the Civil War mostly at home, in this story he becomes a kind of soldier in his grandmother's extra-military campaign against the Yankees, but though he is some years older than in "Ambuscade" - the first of the short stories he narrates; "The Unvanquished" is the fifth - he still follows Granny's lead, and even defers to the orders of Ringo, his slave and companion. He appears or is mentioned in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

Ringo, the same age as Bayard Sartoris, stands as both Bayard's slave and his constant childhood companion; he may even be Bayard's half-brother. He plays a particularly important role in Rosa Millard's mule-trading business in "The Unvanquished": eventually Bayard comes to see that Ringo becomes practically an equal partner with Rosa, and in some ways is even superior to her and to Bayard, as he freely advises both of them and even at one point orders Bayard to fetch paper and ink.

In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Ab Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem. In this story, he appears as a kind of employee of the Sartoris family, who stays behind when most of the white men of Yoknapatawpha County leave to fight in the Civil War. Colonel John Sartoris asks him to look after Rosa Millard while he's away, but indicates how well he knows Ab by also asking Bayard and Ringo to keep an eye on him. Mainly Ab looks after his own interests.