Like several other Yoknapatawpha families, the Sutpens have their own graveyard. It is "half a mile" from the big house (153), in a "clump of cedars on the crest of the hill" (153). Thomas and Ellen Sutpen are buried there under the big tombstones made from imported marble. Charles Bon and Bon's son and Judith Sutpen are also buried there, under smaller stones - Judith's is "at the opposite side" of the cemetery from the other four (170).
The quarters where the enslaved people who worked at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom! live are mentioned briefly - for example, when Bon's letter to Judith in 1861 about enlisting with Henry in the Confederate Army is sent to her "by hand," by a slave who "would steal into the quarters by night and give it to Judith's maid" (273) - but not described until long after all the slaves who once lived there have left to follow the Union Army to freedom.
Like several other Yoknapatawpha families in other fictions, the Sutpens have their own graveyard in Absalom!. It is "half a mile" from the big house (153), in a "clump of cedars on the crest of the hill" (153). Thomas and Ellen Sutpen are buried there under the big tombstones made from imported marble. Charles Bon and Bon's son and Judith Sutpen are also buried there, under smaller stones - Judith's is "at the opposite side" of the cemetery from the other four (170).
This location represents the two kinds of gardens at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!: the decorative, formal gardens laid out by the French architect as one way for the house to assert its status, and the kitchen gardens that produce vegetables for the people who lived at the remote plantation. Rosa Coldfield spends time in both. During a visit in the summer of 1860, she wanders down the "raked and sanded paths" of the formal garden, imagining Bon and Judith's courtship, an image that caused "a child's vacant fairy-tale to come alive in that garden" (117-18).
Like doors elsewhere in the fictions, the gate at the entrance to Sutpen's plantation is both a physical and a symbolic location. It is "half a mile" up a "tree-arched" drive from the house (292). In 1865 it becomes the scene of the crime that the novel's various storytellers keep trying to explain. When Quentin Compson goes past it in 1909, all that's left are "two huge rotting gate posts" (291).
Not long after the Civil War, Sutpen's sole source of income is the "little crossroads store" he opens, "with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons" (147). It serves the poor whites and blacks who live in the area. Wash Jones is the store's "clerk" (147).
The lot beside Sutpen's stable is large enough to provide the arena in which he and his slaves wrestle for sport, while the rest of the slaves and a large number of white men from the county and the town watch. Beyond the stable is a "grove" in which the visiting spectators hitch their "teams and saddle horses and mules" (20).
The grounds of Sutpen's plantation include a "scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen where on Sunday afternoons [Wash] and Sutpen would drink [whisky] from [a] demijohn" (99). Sutpen gets to lie in a "barrel stave hammock" while Wash, after fetching a bucket of water from a spring "almost a mile away," pours the whisky and water and "squats against a post" (99). ("Scuppernong" is a variety of native southern grapes; a "demijohn" is a jug large enough to hold at least three gallons.)
"Sutpen's Hundred" is the "biggest single" cotton plantation in antebellum Yoknapatawpha (56), "a hundred square miles of some of the best virgin bottom land in the country" (26). The novel follows the history of the place from its origins in the 1830s to its dissolution in the early 20th century. The "formal gardens" designed by a French architect (4) become "ruined and weed-choked flower beds" (108).
