Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Sat, 2015-01-31 18:46
There are a number of different boarding houses mentioned in the fictions. Most can be identified by the owner's or landlady's name - the Beard hotel, the Rouncewell boarding house, the Snopes hotel, and so on - but this entry represents three that cannot be so identified. The Jefferson boarding house where the Varners stay in The Hamlet during the four days that spend in town during the county fair is only mentioned in the novel. This is also the case with the unidentified "boardinghouse" where Gavin Stevens lives in "Go Down, Moses" (259, 356).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Sat, 2015-01-31 18:17
In old France, the title "Chevalier" indicated that a man was noble and a member of an order of chivalry. In this story he is the "French companion" whom Ikkemotubbe meets on a trip to New Orleans. When Ikkemotubbe returns to the Chickasaw plantation in northern Yoknapatawpha, De Vitry comes with him. Not much is known about the Chevalier, although the narrator says that he "must have been the Ikkemotubbe of his family" (202) - in other words, the Frenchman probably lacked scruples but had plenty of ambition.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Sat, 2015-01-31 18:02
Mentioned but not named, the narrator's great-grandfather was presumably one of the original planters in Yoknapatawpha, contemporaneous with the first Sartorises and Compsons, but all the story definitely says about him is that "almost a hundred years ago" he bought the slaves from whom Sam Fathers is descended from Ikkemotubbe (203).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Sat, 2015-01-31 17:44
Sam Fathers is 70 years old in "The Old People" when he teaches the young narrator to hunt deer - as he had taught the boy's father before him. His Chickasaw name, Had-Two-Fathers, reflects his mixed racial heritage and complex family history. He is the grandson of Ikkemotubbe, the tribal chief, and an unnamed African American slave woman whom Ikkemotubbe purchased in New Orleans, impregnated, then married off to one of the tribe's black slaves and sold, along with the child, to the narrator's great-grandfather.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Sat, 2015-01-31 17:14
As Joseph Blotner points out, in the typescript for "The Old People" the father of the story's narrator is referred to as "Mr Compson" (presumably the Mr. Compson who is Benjy, Caddy, Quentin and Jason's father), but the character is given no name at all in this magazine version of the story. All we can say with certainty about him is that he belongs to Yoknapatawpha's upper-class, owns a farm four miles from Jefferson and has an office in town. He goes hunting every November with Major de Spain, Walter Ewell, Boon Hogganbeck and Uncle Ike McCaslin.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Sat, 2015-01-31 17:00
The twelve-year-old, unnamed, upper-class boy who narrates "The Old People" also appears in "The Bear." He learns how to hunt from Sam Fathers, killing his first deer under the latter's guidance. Indeed, Fathers smears the blood of the buck upon the boy's face as a masculine rite of passage. The unnamed boy might originally been Quentin Compson; according to Joseph Blotner, in the typescript of "The Old People" Faulkner identified the boy's father explicitly as "Mr Compson." And when Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses, the boy is Ike McCaslin.
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 22:14
The commissary on the Edmonds plantation is where the landlord's records are kept, and where the tenant farmers buy many if not most of their supplies. When Gavin recalls why Roth Edmonds drove Samuel Beauchamp away from the place where he was both, he says Roth "had caught the boy breaking into his commissary store" (259).
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 22:09
Gavin Stevens refers to the store that Samuel Worsham Beauchamp is caught breaking into as "Rouncewell's" (259). It is located in Jefferson (258), but exactly where is not specified. And while in several of the fictions the Rouncewells run a boarding house in Jefferson, and in The Town Mrs. Rouncewell is the town's florist, none of that helps us figure out what is sold in the store here. It's not likely to be flowers.
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 22:00
The dilapidated Worsham house sits on the edge of town. It has a "paintless door," and "the entire house was still lighted by oil lamps and there was no running water in it" (263). Belle Worsham, the current proprietor, inherited the house from her father, Samuel Worsham. In "Go Down, Moses," Mollie Beauchamp, Hamp Worsham, his wife, Belle Worsham, and - at least for a few moments - Gavin Stevens gather in a "clean, spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odor of old maidens" to mourn Samuel Worsham Beauchamp's death (263).
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 21:49
Hamp and his wife live near the dilapidated Worsham house where their white employer, Belle Worsham, "lives alone" (260). They they help Miss Worsham raise chickens and vegetables. The white family once owned the ancestors of the black couple as slaves, so it's likely that - as with Dilsey at the Compsons' or Paralee at the Stevenses - Hamp and his wife life in a cabin behind the big house.
