Hilltop where Sam Fathers Talks (Location Key)

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). More importantly, this elevated spot is a kind of seminary for the boys, with Sam as the spiritual instructor: as Sam talks about the "old times" and "those dead and vanished men of another race" - the Chickasaw Indians - "to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become part of the boy's present" (204, 162). This is a very different past than the white Southern one that in the novel Ike will learn about in a very different place - the commissary of the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation.