General Store in Grenier County (Location Key)

"Barn Burning" begins in this general store, though it's serving as the venue for the trial of Ab Snopes. The description gives a good picture of the goods such stores sell: Ab's young son Sarty, 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 locate the store south of the Yoknapatawpha River on the basis of V.K. Ratliff's account of Ab Snopes' trial in The Hamlet, where he says that it took place "over in Grenier County" (10). Grenier is named after Louis Grenier, the 'old Frenchman' whose huge plantation was built on both the Yoknapatawpha and Grenier sides of the river. (Faulkner apparently renames the county "Mott" in Intruder in the Dust, 184.)