Quarters at Compson Farm (Location Key)

In "A Justice" Sam Fathers is introduced into Faulkner's fictions as "a clever carpenter from the quarters" on the Compson farm (343). This is where the Negro tenants who work on the farm live, and their cabins are part of the larger grounds that include "the barns and smokehouses" (343). The term the narrator uses here - "quarters" - recalls the layout of a slave plantation (343), and in many ways the economic system of white landlords and black sharecroppers that arose in the South after the Civil War replicates the system of slavery. (In "The Old People" and in Go Down, Moses the "quarters" where Sam lives is part of two different plantations; these have their own entries in this index.)