Unnamed People of Frenchman's Bend 6

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. The Hamlet describes the group as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his aristocratic "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him," who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4). These poor farmers settled small parcels of the Frenchman's grant and "built one- and two-room cabins and never painted them, and married one another and produced children and added other rooms one by one to the original cabins." They are a tightly closed community with "their own churches and schools" (5) - although later in the novel the narrator adds that even the parents in the Bend view the school suspiciously as "another Varner enterprise" (107). They intermarry and intermittently murder each other, living according to their laws and almost outside any federal or state legal framework. Faulkner lists their surnames as: Turpin, Haley, Whittington, McCallum, Murray, Leonard, Littlejohn, Riddup, Armstid, and Doshey.