Varner Sharecropper Cabin (Location Key)

In The Hamlet the "sagging broken-backed cabin" where Ab and his family begin working as tenant farmers for the Varners is a grim place: the porch is "sagging and stepless," the windows are "sashless," and the yard is "littered with rubbish - the ashes, shards of pottery and tin cans - of its last tenants" (22). The brief description of the place in The Town focuses on the larger farm around it: "It was a farm so poor and small and already wornout that only the most trifling farmer would undertake it, and even they stayed only one year" (5). This of course is the world that Ab's son Flem was born into. Much later in The Town, and in a very different context, Flem's wife Eula warns Gavin Stevens that "you've got to be careful or you'll have to pity" Flem (347). By showing readers the incredibly bleak life that Flem had as the son of a Southern tenant farmer, Faulkner does make it impossible, at least, not to sympathize with the fierceness of his desire to escape it.