Mrs. Littlejohn's Lot (Location Key)

Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house in Frenchman's Bend appears in 5 different fictions. 3 of these - "Spotted Horses," The Hamlet, The Town - mention the adjacent barn or "livery barn" and fenced-in lot that are there to provide a place for her tenants to keep their horses and mules while staying with her (Hamlet, 31). Faulkner uses the lot in all three of these texts to tell the story of the wild ponies that Flem Snopes brought back with him from Texas, and the chaos that ensued after they were auctioned off and escaped from in the lot. Actually, this event and location appear first in another text: the unfinished "Father Abraham" manuscript that was Faulkner's earliest Yoknapatawpha fiction. In a sense, the lot at Mrs. Littlejohn's is where it all got started.