In Sanctuary these firemen arrive at Popeye's mother's boarding house in Florida to discover his grandmother in the attic, "stamping out a fire of excelsior in the center of the floor" (305). The last time they arrive there, the house is engulfed in flames.
In Light in August Yoknapatawpha is served by a volunteer fire department, made up of "men and youths" who "desert counters and desks" in town to drive the "fire truck" out to Joanna Burden's (288).
in The Town the class of "nameless tenants and croppers" is referred to by Gavin Stevens in his account of Flem Snopes' desire to undermine Manfred de Spain. Although the context is a long way from their actual lives, these people who farm land they do not own are described as "unfutured, barely-solvent one-bale tenant farmers [who] pervaded, covered thinly the whole county and on [whom] in fact the entire cotton economy of the county was founded and supported" (293).
After the Civil War slave labor on Yoknapatawpha's large plantations was often replaced by tenant labor. Two generations of sharecroppers are mentioned in Requiem for a Nun: the "men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico," and their "sons and daughters," who wear "the installment-plan garments" advertised in national magazines (192). According to the novel's exaggerated account, the first group, "an entire generation of farmers," has vanished (193).
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses Gavin Stevens notes that "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260, 357). Although he doesn't say so explicitly, the rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Stevens is sure "they wouldn't" tell Mollie about her grandson's fate, even if they ever "hear about it" (260, 357).
As the narrator of Flags in the Dust says, "the Sartoris place was farmed on shares" (289). The black tenant farmers are not slaves, though Simon thinks of them as "field niggers," a label left over from slavery (241). In the narrative these share croppers are more like part of the landscape than characters, but they are mentioned several times - first when they "raise their hands" to "salute" Bayard as he drives home from the bank at the beginning of the novel (8).
The Negroes who work the land at the Harriss plantation are variously referred to in "Knight's Gambit" as "croppers" and "tenants" (163). As the owners of the land, both Mrs. Harriss' father and her husband use the tenant system, which became widespread across the South in the aftermath of Emancipation. The narrative notes that Mrs. Harriss' father managed the system in such a way that "a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared" to drive the white family's carriage - an "old battered Victoria" - whenever his daughter wanted to go to Jefferson (155). Mr.
"Five men in overalls squatted against the wall of Varner's store" (156) - this is how "The Hound" describes the group whose conversation about Houston's disappearance makes Cotton increasingly uncomfortable. Their discussion suggests all five live nearby. Their "overalls" and "squatting" posture suggest they are all farmers. But the narrative gives no other details to identify them as a group, and distinguishes them from each other only as "the first," "a second," "a third" and "a fourth" (156-57). Cotton's grudge against Houston is common knowledge among them.
As Chick and Aleck Sander travel to the Edmonds place in the morning of "the first winter cold-snap" in Intruder in the Dust (4), they pass small farms where everyone seems to be involved in the same two activities. The women, wearing "sunbonnets" or "men's old felt hats," are boiling water in big kettles, while the men, "with crokersack aprons tied with wire over their overalls," prepare to slaughter hogs (4). (A croker sack is a burlap bag.)
"The Bear" and Go Down, Moses contrast the hunters in the big woods to the "men myriad and nameless even" who "gnaw" and "swarm" and "hack" at the aboriginal forest in order to clear the trees for farming (281-82). Compared to the bear, these farmers and planters are "puny" and "like pygmies" (282).
