Lane through Quarters at McCaslin-Edmonds Place in "Pantaloon in Black" (Location)

This is the lane that connects Rider and Mannie’s rented cabin, "the last one in the lane” (240), with the rest of Edmonds' property and the commissary where Mannie buys supplies. The description implies the existence of the other cabins along the lane, and so evokes the configuration of the antebellum plantation with its quarters for the enslaved workers. In Go Down, Moses, "Pantaloon in Black" appears as the chapter immediately before "The Old People," and in that next story the narrator explicitly calls the cabin on the Edmonds' place where Sam Fathers lives (presumably also on this lane) "a cabin among the other cabins in the quarters" (161). So in that context we move the entry for Rider and Mannie's house into an entry for 'the quarters at the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation. But since the word 'quarters' does not appear in this magazine version of "Pantaloon in Black," we created this separate entry for the house. For some readers of the short story the word "lane" might have been enough to evoke the larger quarters and the longer history of white-black relations in Faulkner's South, but it's by no means clear that Faulkner intends to create that set of associations in this story. When this story is moved to the novel, that set of associations is much more clearly established.