Snopes' Farm (Location Key)

A number of texts note that the Snopeses who steadily move into Jefferson originally come from the Frenchman's Bend part of Yoknapatawpha, but as many of the same texts also note, as landless sharecroppers the various Snopeses occupy many different tenant farms in other parts of the county - and, in "Barn Burning," outside it as well. Only two texts identify a specific rural location as the family's origin point. In As I Lay Dying the Snopes farm somewhere near Varner's store is where Jewel both acquires his horse (sometime before the novel begins) and loses it, after Anse goes there to swap the horse away as part of his negotiation with someone named Snopes for a new team of mules. If this Snopes' first name is either Ab or Flem, Faulkner here locates the Snopes family's rural background as a more settled and prosperous than in any other text, since this Snopes has at least one hired hand and more than one pair of mules on the farm. More consistent with Faulkner's typical representation of the family, the narrator of "Spotted Horses" refers to "a regular nest" of Snopeses who live and work as tenant farmers - that is, sharecroppers - "about five miles down the bottom," which seems to mean five miles from Varner's store, closer to the river (165). The word "nest" tells us something about how this narrator feels about Snopeses - he almost certainly means a nest of snakes, not birds - but very little about the actual place these Snopeses live, though presumably it is a farm or group of farms.