When Will Falls tells Old Bayard the story of how Yankees almost caught Colonel John Sartoris at his plantation during the Civil War, he mentions that Bayard's two sisters (who are never named) went to stay with "yo' gran'pappy" in Memphis when the Colonel went off to fight (20). (In "My Grandmother Millard" we learn that this maternal grandfather owned a "supply house" in Memphis.)
Ben Robbins is a senior postdoctoral researcher in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and project leader of "Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900–69," which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is the author of Faulkner's Hollywood Novels: Women between Page and Screen (University of Virginia Press, 2024).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Tue, 2013-10-15 17:44
The road between Jefferson and Frenchman's Bend is one of the most traveled roads in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group. In this novel, it is taken by Lena Grove when she rides from Varner's store to town in the wagon of an unnamed country man. They are almost to Jefferson when they "crest the final hill" on the road and see, "across the valley," "two columns of smoke" - one from the power plant's smokestack and the other from the fire at Joanna Burden's (29).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Tue, 2013-10-15 17:22
Samson's place, in the Frenchman's Bend area, is the first named Yoknapatawpha location that Lena Grove passes on her journey. Its location in Light in August seems at variance with the location of Samson's bridge, which washes out in As I Lay Dying.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Tue, 2013-10-15 17:20
"Samson's" appears in As I Lay Dying and again in Light in August, both times in the Frenchman's Bend section of Yoknapatawpha, but in two different places. In the first novel Samson lives next to the river, in what seems to be both a store and a farm. The porch of the store is where Samson, MacCallum and Quick watch the Bundrens pass by in their wagon before they realize the bridge there is out - probably the same bridge as the 'Samson's Bridge' that is a Location in Flags in the Dust.
