This cabin is the site of an unusual social experiment, mentioned in The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses. After Old Carothers McCaslin dies, his sons Buck and Buddy build this "oneroom log cabin" for themselves on the plantation, and move "all the slaves" into "the big house" - the "tremendously-conceived" plantation mansion that their father had built for his family (Go Down, Moses, 248).
Frenchman's Bend - the hamlet of the title - is a very rural community twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Its population is almost entirely white. The local landowner is Will Varner, and many of the other residents are tenant farmers on land he owns, but a number of the other small farms around the Bend are owned by the families that work them.
Sam and his unnamed wife, "the cook" (158), live in a cabin behind Will Varner's house. They are servants, but the cabin may very well have been built as a slave cabin before the Civil War.
In The Hamlet Will Varner's servants, Sam and his unnamed wife, "the cook" (158), live in a cabin behind the Varner family's house in Frenchman's Bend. The cabin may very well have been built as a slave cabin before the Civil War.
