Blacksmith Shop on Unnamed Plantation (Location Key)

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. On their plantation, and in this story, "Sam's shop" is where he and Jobaker, "a full-blood Chickasaw," would talk, using "a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue" that over time the narrator says he "began to learn" (204). (Sam's 'Blacksmith Shop' has two other entries in the index.)