Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Sun, 2015-02-22 14:21
There is no description of the main house in this story as it was burned by Union soldiers in the preceding short story "Retreat." The only information conveyed here is that the main house had a number of chimneys and housed a big clock. The rest is a pile of ashes.
If this character exists, he is the illegitimate son of Ikkemotubbe and an unnamed "slave woman" who was bought in New Orleans (202). He is also the sole father of Sam Had-Two-Fathers. The Harpers Magazine version of "The Old People" creates an ambiguity when it says that "almost a hundred years ago" Ikkemotubbe sold "his own son" to a white planter, the great-grandfather of the narrator on whose farm Sam lived for most of his life (203). Since Sam is "seventy" years old (202), he could not be this man, and would have to be this man's son.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sun, 2015-02-08 12:35
Sam Fathers teaches the unnamed boy to hunt by shooting rabbits in the woods in the settled country near to the boy's father's farm. The woods are close to a creek where Sam Fathers and the boy let their dogs hunt raccoons. Turkeys roost in the trees.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sun, 2015-02-08 12:28
Sam Fathers teaches the unnamed boy who tells the story of "The Old People" to hunt by shooting rabbits in the woods near the boy's father's farm. The woods are close to a creek where Sam Fathers and the boy let their dogs hunt raccoons. Turkeys roost in the trees. (In Go Down, Moses Faulkner turns the boy Sam tutors into Ike McCaslin, and moves the woods he learns to hunt in further from town, out to the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation.)
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sat, 2015-02-07 10:18
The small road that connects the hunting camp with the main road near the hunting camp, along which the hunters take the horses and wagons filled with "the bedding and the meat and the heads, the antlers, the good ones" (206)
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Sat, 2015-02-07 10:10
The road through the big woods to the hunting camp is more like a path. In "Lion" it is heavily rutted enough to make the wagon bounce around on it (187).
Submitted by kristi.humphrey... on Fri, 2015-02-06 17:46
John Sartoris fought for the South in the Civil War as both a regular and an irregular Confederate Colonel. In "Skirmish," Sartoris has returned after the South's surrender to reconstruct the plantation house that was burned by Yankees during the war and to continue fighting for the Old (white) South by organizing resistance to Reconstruction, in particular the efforts by Federal agents to secure the right of the newly emancipated slaves to vote and run for office.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Wed, 2015-02-04 12:15
The "two or three companions of [Ikkemotubbe's] bachelor youth" who meet him at the "river" upon his return from New Orleans are briefly mentioned by in the story (202).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Wed, 2015-02-04 12:06
The narrator's grandfather is briefly mentioned, but his name is not identified nor is much else about him explained except that he lived in "the same country" and had "grown up" and "lived" in "almost the same manner" as his grandson (202). Presumably, the grandfather was a planter and, therefore, influential in the Yoknapatawpha County.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2015-02-02 14:30
The hunting stand where the narrator waits with Sam Fathers for a shot at his first deer is in the middle of what Faulkner elsewhere calls "the Big Woods," a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe had ever sounded" (206). In deer hunting a "stand" can mean an elevated platform attached to a tree. In this case, however, "stand" simply means the place in the woods allotted to Ike by the hunting party, "one of the poorer stands . . . since he was only" a boy (205), probably at one end of a widely-spaced line of hunters.
