Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-04-24 00:20
Ratliff owns a "sleeping partner's half interest" in this Jefferson restaurant, referred to as a "side-street lunch-room" (393). When he swaps it for a share of the Old Frenchman's place at the end of the novel, he gives Flem Snopes the foothold he needs from which to begin his quest for wealth and respectability in the town.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-04-24 00:18
It is from this 'back-alley' or 'side-street' restaurant that Flem Snopes launches his climb toward wealth and respectability in Jefferson. As soon as he acquires a half-ownership of it by fleecing V.K. Ratliff ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," The Hamlet) he moves to town, living with his wife Eula and their child in a tent behind the restaurant. Both Flem and Eula work in the restaurant for a while, but it isn't long before Flem acquires the other half from Ratliff's co-owner Grover Winbush, and brings additional Snopeses in from Frenchman's Bend to run it.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-04-24 00:17
A cotton gin is a machine that separates the cotton from the seeds. Like so much else in Frenchman's Bend, the gin where the local farmers take their harvested cotton in the fall is owned and operated by the Varners.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-04-24 00:15
A cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton seeds from cotton fibers. In The Hamlet, the gin where the local farmers take their harvested cotton in the fall is, like so much else in Frenchman's Bend, owned and operated by the Varners.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sun, 2016-04-24 00:14
"Cain's," the store where Ab Snopes buys the milk separator for his wife, is a hardware or perhaps a department store. The alley behind it is where Ab tethers the unruly team of mules he traded for with Pat Stamper. ("Cain's" does not appear in any other Yoknapatawpha fiction; in "Fool for a Horse," the first text to tell this story, the coveted milk separator is for sale in McCaslin's hardware store.)
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-04-23 16:45
The first time the Frenchman's Bend blacksmith shop appears in a fiction is when Byron Snopes is fleeing Yoknapatawpha after robbing the bank in Flags in the Dust. The date of the novel is 1929; the date of the event in the novel is 1919. Byron grew up in the Bend, but notes a change as he drives past it: the "blacksmith shop" is now also "a garage," "with a gasoline pump" (278). The blacksmith shop is mentioned again in the first two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. The Hamlet was published in 1940.
