Anselm Holland's Cabin (Location Key)

Located back in the hills in "Smoke," this is the "dirt-floored, two room cabin" where Anselm Holland Jr. lives "like a hermit, doing his own cooking" (5). There are dozens of cabins in the fictions, but only three are explicitly "dirt-floored," which seems to suggest an extraordinary degree of poverty - or perhaps just rusticity. And in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group the folks who live, as Anselm does, in the hills are often extremely poor. But Anselm chooses to live there after falling out with his father about the property - "two thousand acres of some of the best land in the county" (3) - they inherited from his mother's side of the family. (See also "Ernest Cotton's Farm," "Dirt-floored Cabin in the Hills," and "Back in the Hills" in this index.)