Vynie

The woman whom the narrator of "Fool about a Horse" calls "Mammy" is named "Vynie." She works hard and frugally to contribute to her family's farm income, so she is resentful, suspicious, and caustic about her husband's misadventures in horse-trading. When his foolishness results in the loss of the milk separator she wanted, she cries for the first time in her son's experience. Still resolute, she goes off alone to recover the separator, but in the end she is as big a fool about that machine as her husband is about the horse. (When Faulkner interpolated a revised version of this story into The Hamlet, this "Vynie" became "Vynie Snopes," Ab's first wife.)