Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:05
In "Fool about a Horse" and The Hamlet Pat Stamper, the itinerant horse trader, sets up a temporary camp "outside Jefferson right by the road" (Hamlet, 38). The story locates the spot as "Hoke's pasture" (124), and describes the camp as elaborate enough to include a "stock pen" (129) as well as at least one "tent" (131).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:02
In The Hamlet "Whiteleaf" is the name of a creek, a hamlet and a store. There is good reason to think that when he created these locations Faulkner was thinking of the real Yellow Leaf creek, which flows through the southeast corner of Lafayette County into the Yocona River, but even better reason to think that, as was invariably the case, he was willing to shift real places around to suit the imaginative needs of a particular story.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:00
This is the church "a mile away" from the Whiteleaf store, from which the pews are fetched "for their litigants and their clansmen and witnesses" in the two civil trials at the end of The Hamlet (356).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:57
Ratliff grew up on a tenant farm a mile away from Ab Snopes, who like Ratliff's father were share cropping land that belonged to Old Man Anse Holland. It is unclear where in Yoknapatawpha Holland's property is.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:52
His name is V.K. Suratt in Flags in the Dust when he tells Bayard Sartoris and Hub about how he "learnt to chop cotton" on the tenant farm where he grew up (137). In The Hamlet his name is V.K. Ratliff when he tells a group of men at Littlejohn's boarding house that he grew up on a tenant farm "about a mile away" from where Ab Snopes was living (33); later the narrative says that he "had been born and raised not far away" from the Bend (85). We have to speculate about where to locate V.K.'s childhood on the map.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:50
It is on this road, "five miles from the village" of Frenchman's Bend, that Will Varner hears from Ratliff about the barns that Ab Snopes - Varner's new tenant - has burned (13).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:48
It is on this road, "five miles from the village" of Frenchman's Bend, that Will Varner hears from Ratliff about the barns that Ab Snopes - Varner's new tenant - has burned (The Hamlet, 13).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:45
Mink Snopes and his family live in "a broken-backed cabin" off a "narrow road back in the hills" (80), four miles from Frenchman's Bend (268). It is also described as a "paintless two-room cabin with an open hallway between and a leanto kitchen" (243). Mink put his name in "crude lettering" on the "battered and scarred mailbox" in front of the "foul muck-trodden lot" (80-81), but in fact the land he farms as a share cropper is "a foreclosed portion of Houston's farm" (275) that now, like so much else in the Bend, is owned by Will Varner.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:30
This is the general store near Major de Spain's where Ab Snopes' suit against his landlord is heard. In Yoknapatawpha country crossroad stores regularly serve as the venue for trials - as again later in the novel in the civil suits that Mrs. Armstid and Mrs. Tull bring against Flem and Eck Snopes. (The narrative seems to suggest that Ab's confrontations with de Spain take place far away from Frenchman's Bend, otherwise Jody Varner would have likely have known about it before Ratliff tells him, which is why we put this store on the opposite side of the county.)
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 09:16
Although the De Spain's, father and son, appear often in Faulkner's fictions, this novel provides few details about them or their plantation. Since Ratliff's account of Ab Snopes' experience with De Spain is essentially a summary of the story Faulkner told in "Barn Burning," we have set the de Spain property in the same place as the editors of that story did. Our speculation is also based on the fact that Jody Varner has not previously heard what Ratliff tells him, which suggests the events occurred on the opposite side of the county.
