Frenchman's Bend - the hamlet of the title - is a very rural community twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Its population is almost entirely white. The local landowner is Will Varner, and many of the other residents are tenant farmers on land he owns, but a number of the other small farms around the Bend are owned by the families that work them.
Sam and his unnamed wife, "the cook" (158), live in a cabin behind Will Varner's house. They are servants, but the cabin may very well have been built as a slave cabin before the Civil War.
In The Hamlet Will Varner's servants, Sam and his unnamed wife, "the cook" (158), live in a cabin behind the Varner family's house in Frenchman's Bend. The cabin may very well have been built as a slave cabin before the Civil War.
