Slave Quarters at Sutpen's (Location Key)

The quarters where the enslaved people who worked at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom! live are mentioned briefly - for example, when Bon's letter to Judith in 1861 about enlisting with Henry in the Confederate Army is sent to her "by hand," by a slave who "would steal into the quarters by night and give it to Judith's maid" (273) - but not described until long after all the slaves who once lived there have left to follow the Union Army to freedom. The quarters are described when the mixed-race Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon - Sutpen's unacknowledged bi-racial grandson - moves into "one of the dilapidated slave cabins" in the quarters in the early 1880s. His cabin stands on a "weedy lane between the deserted collapsed cabins" (169): "the old street of the slave quarters - a jungle of sumach and persimmon and briers and honey-suckle, and the rotting piles of what had once been log walls and stone chimneys and shingle roofs" (173). Charles works on the former plantation as a tenant farmer, and "rebuilds" the cabin to live there with his Negro wife and son (167). That son, Sutpen's last descendant, is born in this place.