Suratt's|Ratliff's Childhood Farm (Location Key)

His name is V.K. Suratt in Flags in the Dust when he tells Bayard Sartoris and Hub about how he "learnt to chop cotton" on the tenant farm where he grew up (137). In The Hamlet his name is V.K. Ratliff when he tells a group of men at Littlejohn's boarding house that he grew up on a tenant farm "about a mile away" from where Ab Snopes was living (33); later the narrative says that he "had been born and raised not far away" from the Bend (85). We have to speculate about where to locate V.K.'s childhood on the map. Throughout the throughout the Yoknapatawpha fiction he is identified with the Frenchman's Bend area of the county, and cotton would be typically planted in the flatter, richer "bottom" land. But as V.K. himself notes, one thing about the tenant farm is certain: "ever' time we made a furrow, we was scratchin' dirt fer somebody else" - the man who owned the land (137).