Slave Quarters at Sutpen's in Absalom, Absalom! (Location)

This icon represents the many cabins that formed the "quarters" in which, before the Civil War, the slaves who worked on Sutpen's plantation lived, and the single cabin in which Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon lives in the early 1880s. The novel does not say how many slaves there were at the time that Sutpen's Hundred was the largest, richest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, but "hundred" is probably not a big enough number. The quarters where this population was housed are only described long after all the slaves have left to follow the Union Army, as a "weedy lane between the deserted collapsed cabins" (169); as "the old street of the slave quarters - a jungle of sumach and persimmon and briers and honey-suckle, and the rotting piles of what had once been log walls and stone chimneys and shingle roofs" (173). Sutpen's last descendant is born in this place, "in one of the dilapidated slave cabins" that Charles, his father, "rebuilt" when he returns to the place as a tenant farmer (167).