First General Store in "Barn Burning" in "Barn Burning" (Location)

"Barn Burning" begins in a general store. In addition to selling staple goods, such stores served as centers of community activity. The Justice of the Peace uses this store as a makeshift court. Young Sarty Snopes, the story's focal character, sits on a keg of nails: "from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief" (3). We know neither the name nor location of the store.  Our decision to locate it on the other side of the river Faulkner named the Yoknapatawpha, south and east of Jefferson, is speculative - though partly based on the area's proximity to Frenchman's Bend, where "the Snopeses" come from in many other Yoknapatawpha fictions.