Vynie

To the narrator she is "Mammy," but when her husband reveals her name when trying to calm her down: "Now Vynie; now Vynie - " (123). She works hard and frugally to contribute to her family's farm income, so she is resentful, suspicious, and caustic about her husband's adventures in horse-trading: "Horse trader! Setting there bragging and lying to a passel of shiftless men, and the weeds and morning glories climbing that thick in the corn and cotton that I am afraid to tote his dinner to him for fear of snakes" (120). Her industrious heart is set on owning a cream separator and she is so devastated when her husband and son return from Jefferson without it that 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.)