Frenchman's Bend Blacksmith (Location Key)

The first time the Frenchman's Bend blacksmith shop appears in a fiction is when Byron Snopes is fleeing Yoknapatawpha after robbing the bank in Flags in the Dust. The date of the novel is 1929; the date of the event in the novel is 1919. Byron grew up in the Bend, but notes a change as he drives past it: the "blacksmith shop" is now also "a garage," "with a gasoline pump" (278). The blacksmith shop is mentioned again in the first two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. The Hamlet was published in 1940. According to its chronology, a man named Trumbull has been the blacksmith in the Bend for "almost twenty years" when he's dispossessed by Snopeses in 1896 or so (69). In The Town, however, published in 1957, the same dispossession takes place about a decade later, and after Trumbull has been the smith "man and boy for fifty years" (38). While the transition from blacksmith to garage mechanic is a sign of how the world moves forward, the way these events move forward and backward and sometimes both at the same time is a sign of how time often behaves in Faulkner's world.