The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

According to the narrator of The Hamlet, "county officers do not bother [the people of Frenchman's Bend] at all save in the heel of election years" (5). The reference is to 'peace officers,' i.e. policemen, though in Yoknapatawpha the term 'police' is rarely used to describe the county's sheriffs and deputies or the marshals in the town. The county sheriffs all are elected, which explains the last part of that quotation, but in fact the novel shows them doing their job in Frenchman's Bend, at least when Houston is murdered.

These "federal officers" would usually be called 'revenuers' (5). When the Old Frenchman's original plantation falls into decay after the Civil War, the area that becomes known as Frenchman's Bend transforms into an enclosed back country effectively outside the reach of government authorities. From time to time, "federal officers" (who would have come to Bend trying to enforce the laws against making moonshine) go "into the country and vanish," though with a trace: after their disappearance their clothing and possessions are sometimes seen on a local "child or old man or woman" (5).

The people who live in Frenchman's Bend anonymously are largely portrayed as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his plantation "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him" on the land, who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4) and are distinctly less well off than the Frenchman, bringing only what they "could carry in their hands" (5). They came from England and the Scottish and Welsh Marches, arriving by way of the Atlantic seaboard and passing "through the Tennessee mountains by stages" (4).

Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to seize Vicksburg, Mississippi consisted of numerous battles from December 1862 to July 1863. In Yoknapatawpha County, one of the prevailing legends is that the "Old Frenchman" buried his fortune due to Grant’s invasion of Mississippi.

The sixty-year-old chief landowner of Frenchman’s Bend, Will Varner owns "most of the good land in the country and holds mortgages on most of the rest." As such, he is the "chief man of the country" (5), at once the "largest landowner" and "the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion" for the people of two counties (5). He is a farmer, usurer, and veterinarian and serves as the "beat supervisor in one county and Justice of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both" (5).

One of the original white settlers of the region, the Old Frenchman brought “his family and slaves” (4) to Yoknapatawpha and “hewed” a “tremendous plantation” out of the “cane-and-cypress jungle” (3). In the later novels Intruder in the Dust (1948) and The Reivers (1962), Faulkner calls this settler the Huguenot Louis Grenier and relates how he came to Mississippi in the 1790’s to establish and name Jefferson. As with a number of the plantation families in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha narratives, his dynastic ambitions cannot be sustained.