In "The Hound" this slough is where a man named Cotton throws the gun with which he shot Houston to try to get rid of it. In The Hamlet, Faulkner brings this story into the Snopes trilogy by re-naming the man who kills Houston Mink Snopes, and enlarging the account of how, after using the gun, Mink wanders in the bottom where this slough is found. In the local vernacular, a "bottom" refers to the landscape around a creek or small river. It is usually dense with brush, vines and small trees. And a "slough" is a pool of stagnant water beside a creek or river.
In "The Hound" Cotton tries to hide Houston's corpse in a hollow tree stump: "a rotting cypress shell, topless, about ten feet tall" (155). In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tries to hide it in "the shell of a once-tremendous pin oak, topless and about ten feet tall" (249-50).
Ernest Cotton's small farm in "The Hound" is four miles from the spot where he kills Houston. He lives there alone in "a chinked log cabin floored with clay" that he built himself, "log by log" (153, 155). The house sits on a hill above the "dark band of timber" (155) and the "jungle" (154) that separate his farm from the river. The property also contains a "well-house" (153), and a "meager corn patch" (160). It does not appear that Cotton grows any cotton.
The first time Houston is murdered in the fictions, in "The Hound," the man who shoots him is named Cotton and the spot is described as "a quiet road, little used," a "short cut between [Houston's] house and Varner's store; a quiet, fading, grass-grown trace along the edge of the river bottom" (152-53). There Cotton lies in ambush "behind a log" in a "thicket" of bushes until Houston rides by (152).
Varner's general store serves as the social center for the farmers in this story. They gather to sit or squat and talk under the "wooden awning" of its "veranda" or front porch (156). Although Faulkner never says so explicitly in this story, elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions this store is in Frenchman's Bend; it is owned by Will Varner and run by his son Jody.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Wed, 2016-05-11 12:19
Ringo, the grandson of Louvinia and Joby. was born a slave, though by the end of this novel, as a result of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the South's defeat in the Civil War, he is legally free - or, as he puts it in the story, "I aint a nigger anymore. I done been abolished" (199). Even as a slave he occupied an intimate place in the Sartoris family, and plays a large role in all The Unvanquished stories, as both Bayard's personal servant and his friend.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Wed, 2016-05-11 07:40
Major de Spain's house is situated between General Compson's house and the McCaslin plantation, and is 17 miles away from the latter. The first Major de Spain was one of the original landowners of Yoknapatawpha County, and although this home is not described in Go Down, Moses, it is depicted in other Faulkner texts, such as "Barn Burning" and "Shall Not Perish," as a large, grand plantation house.
