Sam Fathers' Blacksmith Shop 3 in Go Down, Moses (Location)

Like the cabin that Sam Fathers lives in before he moves out to the big woods, the blacksmith shop where he works is one of the locations that Faulkner moves around to suit his changing imaginative project. Initially, in "A Justice," it's on the Compson farm, but for the hunting stories he wrote Faulkner first attenuates Sam's connection to the white world (the family he works for in "The Old People" is not named), then in Go Down, Moses shifts that connection to the McCaslins, and this blacksmith shop comes with him each time. The McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is its final destination - though not Sam's. While he lives among whites and Negroes he "sharpens plow-points and mends tools and even does rough carpenter-work" for the plantation (160) in this shop. It is also where Ike occasionally finds him talking with Jobaker, "a full-blood Chickasaw" (163). (Sam's 'Blacksmith Shop' has two other entries in the index.)