Sam Fathers' Blacksmith Shop 2 in "The Old People" (Location)

Like the cabin that Sam Fathers lives in before he moves out to the big woods, the blacksmith shop where he works is one of the locations that Faulkner moves around to suit his changing imaginative project. Initially, in "A Justice," it's on the Compson farm, but for the hunting stories he wrote Faulkner first attenuates Sam's connection to the white world (the family he works for in "The Old People" is not named), then in Go Down, Moses shifts that connection to the McCaslins, and this blacksmith shop comes with him each time. This Location is represents the shops intermediate stop, on the grounds of the plantation owned by the unnamed narrator's father. "Sam's shop" is where he and Jobaker, "a full-blood Chickasaw," would talk, using "a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue" that over time the narrator says he "began to learn" (204). (Sam's 'Blacksmith Shop' has two other entries in the index.)