The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "The Old People" Walter Ewell's house is two miles from Jefferson somewhere between the hunting camp and De Spain's mansion.

This is the hilltop in the woods with the impressive view of the night sky that appears in "The Old People" and Go Down, Moses - although in slightly different parts of the county. Sam Fathers visits the spot with two different boys (he's unnamed in the story and Ike McCaslin in the novel) to release the dogs to hunt foxes or raccoons (203, 162).

For Faulkner aficionados the "big woods" in his hunting stories are a place like the pathless wilderness where Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook have adventures in Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales or the big river where Huck Finn and Jim travel on the raft in Mark Twain's novel - one of the enchanted places in the American imaginary. If Faulkner's "South" is haunted by its past and divided up by issues of race and class and gender, the "big woods" apparently offers a kind of escape into a world that is timeless and whole.

Like the cabin that Sam Fathers lives in before he moves out to the big woods, the blacksmith shop where he works is one of the locations that Faulkner moves around to suit his changing imaginative project. Initially, in "A Justice," it's on the Compson farm, and the last time the shop is visited it's on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation in Go Down, Moses. But here, in "The Old People," it's in an intermediate space - because the narrator and his family, the white family Sam works for, are not named.

The white family for whom Sam Fathers works in the magazine version of "The Old People" is not named. Here too, as in "A Justice" and Go Down, Moses, Sam lives "among Negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins" (203). This story calls the larger property a "farm" (203), and the Negroes who work on it are tenant farmers or sharecroppers, but its layout suggests the design of a slave plantation, where the slaves lived in the 'quarters' somewhere behind the owners' big house.

This "faint crossing" in the wilderness figures in "The Old People," "The Bear" and Go Down, Moses. Located near De Spain's hunting camp, it is where a deer trail, a path the animals themselves have made through the woods, intersects the trail along the ridge that the hunters have made. Such crossings are good places to wait for game. It is where Sam Fathers teaches Quentin Compson (in "The Old People"), the unnamed boy (in "The Bear"), and Ike McCaslin (in Go Down, Moses) how to hunt big game.

This "ridge" appears in "The Old People" (both as a short story and as a chapter in Go Down, Moses) and "The Bear," but only a woodsman can recognize it. In "The Old People" it is described as invisible from within the woods. The narrator discerns that they have reached the edge of the ridge when he notices that "the earth had risen slightly because the underbrush had thinned a little, the ground sloping invisibly away toward a dense wall of cane" (171). The text also comments that where the ridge begins there is "a tremendous pin oak" (208).

The trail along which the hunters take the wagon and horses in "The Old People" bends away through the woods from the hunting camp. It is flanked at one point by a paw-paw thicket.

Before they reach the big woods, the hunters travel past the "skeletoned cotton- and corn-fields . . . hard, gaunt, and motionless beneath the gray rain" and houses and barns ("The Old People," 206; Go Down, Moses, 168). The fields are "skeletoned" at this time of year because they've been harvested. The houses and barns mark the the last point "where the hand of man had clawed for an instant, holding, the wall of the wilderness" that lies just beyond them (206).

The road into the big woods presumably branches off the northwest road. "The Old People" vividly describes the spot at which it enters the wilderness: the hunters cross a "line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall" (168). On one side of this door, the "skeleton cotton- and corn-fields," "houses, barns, fences" of Yoknapatawpha - on the other, the "wilderness," "tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable" (168, 206).