Tenant Farm on Holland's Land (Location Key)

This is one of the several pieces of un-real estate in Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner moves around to fit the needs of different stories. In "Fool about a Horse," the unnamed family of the narrator lives in Frenchman's Bend, on a farm at some distance beyond Varner's store. Although the story does not explicitly say so, it seems likely that the family are tenant farmers and the farm itself belongs to "Old Man Anse Holland," given the way the narrator's Pap freely uses Holland's property - "bob-wire and busted tools" and so on (118) - to make horse trades, and tries to "borrow a mule" from Holland when he loses his own (134). Nor does the text provide much detail about the house they live in, though we know it has a "kitchen" (134) and a "gallery," or porch (133). They grow cotton on the field referred to as "the lower piece" (134), a phrase that implies another field where corn is grown. The text also mentions the fenced "lot" (119), the "well" (120) and the "stable" (133) that are also part of the property. There is no mention of a cow. Later Faulkner decided to re-tell this story as part of Ab Snopes' biography in The Hamlet. In the novel Ab could not have lived in Frenchman's Bend prior to his arrival there on page 8, so Faulkner relocates Old Man Anse Holland's property away from the Bend to a place described as fourteen miles from Jefferson. To get to town Ab has to travel up a number of hills and through the hamlet of Whiteleaf (cf. 35), details which inform our speculation about where in the county it now lies. Despite the new location, Ab's place - like his misadventure with horses and mules - is essentially the same as "Pap's."