Negro Farm with Bull (Location Key)

This "Negro's house" with its "empty yard" is where Mink Snopes takes his milk cow in The Mansion "to claim a second stand from the bull" after the first one failed to impregnate her (9). It is "three miles" from Mink's cabin, though the novel does not say in which direction. The Negro who lives there with his family is prosperous enough to own a "scrub bull" that he hires out (9). But although the narrator calls his home a "house" three times in one paragraph, it is almost certainly what in other texts, and elsewhere in The Mansion, Faulkner calls a "cabin," a building with at most two rooms. This Negro family lives either in or near Frenchman's Bend, a part of the county where there are very few blacks, and even fewer black farmers - but in The Hamlet there is also a Negro living one mile from Mink's. See Nate's Cabin and Negro Cabin near Bend elsewhere in this index.