Lucy Gray Baird

The Covey singer who won the 10th Hunger Games with Coriolanus Snow as her mentor, then vanished.

Lucy Gray Baird won the 10th Hunger Games as the female tribute of District 12. District 12 was not her birthplace: she belonged to the Covey, travelling musicians whom the war's end forced to settle there.

Quick Facts

District: 12
Games: 10th Hunger Games
Group: Covey
Mentor: Coriolanus Snow
Song: The Hanging Tree

Facts from the source article.

Background

Her boyfriend before the Reaping, the Covey's Billy Taupe, was also seeing Mayfair Lipp, the mayor's daughter, and Lucy Gray suspects Mayfair had her reaped on purpose. Her assigned mentor is Coriolanus Snow, and feelings grow between them. Charisma, singing and a knack for snake charming win over the audiences. Snow slips her a compact for smuggling rat poison into the arena and lets the snake mutations learn her smell so they leave her alone; she uses the poison on Wovey and Reaper and keeps the snakes under control. Because of the illicit assistance she received, she gets very little publicity afterwards.

When Snow is sent to District 12 as a Peacekeeper the two meet again; by then she has written "The Hanging Tree". After Snow kills Mayfair the mayor wants Lucy Gray arrested for the killing, so she and Snow run from the district together, until she works out his role in the death of Sejanus Plinth. Deciding that he is untrustworthy, she flees and possibly leaves a trap; Snow shoots a rifle in her direction but is unable to find any evidence of what became of her.

Her fate is left ambiguous, since she never appears again and is swiftly erased from public memory by Gaul, who destroys all recordings of the Games except one master tape she keeps for herself. Katniss alludes to her indirectly in The Hunger Games as a District 12 victor other than Haymitch. Sunrise on the Reaping, forty years after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, mentions her several times, and while searching the Covey's secret graveyard for Lenore Dove's grave Haymitch stumbles across Lucy Gray's; the poem on it suggests the Covey believed she might still be alive.