The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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.

After a disagreement with De Spain, Ab Snopes and his son Flem burn down this barn. It is unclear where De Spain's property is located, but likely it is in the fertile region to the north of Jefferson, where most of Yoknapatawpha's big estates are found; and it must be far enough away from Frenchman's Bend to have kept Jody Varner from hearing about Ab before he meets him.

This is the tenant's cabin on the de Spain property where the Snopes briefly reside. Ab proclaims, "Likely it aint fitten for hawgs" (15).

What the narrative calls "the Jefferson highroad" (390) is one of Yoknapatawpha's major arteries, though it is unpaved: the 20-mile road that connects the town of Jefferson with the hamlet of Frenchman's Bend. This icon represents the spot where Ratliff, driving his team toward the Bend at the end of Book Two, has his epiphany about the "waste" of Eula Varner's mythic beauty.

Located opposite Varner's store, the "hotel" run by Mrs. Littlejohn is a boarding house whose residents are mostly "drummers and livestock-traders" (31) traveling through Frenchman's Bend or staying there on business. The building is described as "a sprawling rambling edifice partly of sawn boards and partly of logs, unpainted and of two storeys" (31). Like Varner's store, it is also a hub of Frenchman's Bend social life and gossip. Throughout The Hamlet, Ratliff will get much of the information about the goings on in town through his conversations at Mrs. Littlejohn's.

Will Varner owns the only house in Frenchman's Bend with "more than one story"; the only other two-story building is Littlejohn's hotel (11). Because Will's daughter Eula lives there, the house is the place where "about a dozen" of the young men of Frenchman's Bend come every Sunday to tie their mules to "the Varner fence" and spend the afternoon "sitting-out" - courting - "on the veranda" of the house (145). Near the house is the "cabin" in which the Varners' cook lives (158).

Before coming to Frenchman's Bend by way of de Spain's and McCaslin's place, Ab Snopes "was mixed up in that burnt barn of a fellow named Harris over in Grenier County" (10).