Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Mon, 2015-08-31 16:38
In "A Justice" Sam Fathers is introduced into Faulkner's fictions as "a clever carpenter from the quarters" on the Compson farm (343). This is where the Negro tenants who work on the farm live, and their cabins are part of the larger grounds that include "the barns and smokehouses" (343). The term the narrator uses here - "quarters" - recalls the layout of a slave plantation (343), and in many ways the economic system of white landlords and black sharecroppers that arose in the South after the Civil War replicates the system of slavery.
The Compson "farm" where Sam Fathers works is "four miles away" from the Compson place that readers of The Sound and the Fury are familiar with (343). It seems more like a plantation than a farm, run by a "manager" and with "barns and smokehouses," a "peach orchard," and a "quarters" where Sam lives with "the Negroes" - probably tenant farmers (343, 359). The narrative says that to get there a wagon has to go up and down several hills, but doesn't say what direction from town it has to travel in.
A second slave cabin on the Sartoris plantation is mentioned in 4 of the Unvanquished stories. It is referred to several times as "the other cabin" ("Skirmish at Sartoris," 62, 192), but even though no other cabins are ever mentioned, there must have been many other cabins in the quarters, given the size and wealth of the plantation. This other cabin is originally occupied by Loosh and his wife Philadelphy. It is probably not far from the one lived in by Joby and Louvinia (Loosh's father and mother) - unless you measure the distance politically.
The Sartoris plantation is large enough to have had a sizable population of enslaved people living on it, and in the story called "The Unvanquished," and again in the chapter called "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished as a novel, Ringo refers to "the quarters" that are "back yonder" behind the white family's destroyed mansion (88, 142). Only two of the cabins in the quarters, however, are ever depicted in Faulkner's fictions; both are occupied originally by the plantation's house slaves.
