Cemetery North of Frenchman's Bend (Location Key)

Although not explicitly named, the setting for the events in "Hand Upon the Waters" is the area in and around Frenchman's Bend. The bend in the road, the store, the river and the history of the family of Louis Grenier (the original 'Old Frenchman') all make this clear to readers of the Yoknapatawpha fictions. But the cemetery in this story cannot be the Frenchman's Bend cemetery that appears in The Hamlet. Both are adjacent to churches, but in the novel the churchyard is on the road to Jefferson and visible from the Bend; in the short story the cemetery is some distance up a road that leads into the hills north of the Bend, a road which vanishes around its curves so that Gavin Stevens can only see a short distance along it. As befits their hill-country location, both the "white-painted and steepleless" church and its cemetery are rugged: the churchyard is described as "an unfenced straggle of cheap marble headstones and other graves outlined only by rows of inverted glass jars and crockery and broken brick" (75). Those homemade memorials resemble the "shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick" that mark the graves in the African American cemetery in "Pantaloon in Black," where they are explicitly identified with black burial rituals (Go Down, Moses, 129), but the cemetery in "Hand Upon the Waters" is almost definitely not an exception to the rules of Jim Crow segregation: the one person we know is buried there is white, and Frenchman's Bend is notorious in Faulkner's fictions for its lack of black inhabitants.

Occupant: Lonnie Grinnup.