Unnamed Family's Plantation (Location Key)

The plantation where Sam Fathers works is another example of how Faulkner moves his un-real estate around Yoknapatawpha. In "A Justice" it belongs to the Compson family. In Go Down, Moses it belongs to the McCaslin-Edmonds family. In these two intermediate stories, "The Old People" and "The Bear," it belongs to the family of the unnamed young narrator. Like the Compson farm, this "plantation" - as it is called in "The Bear" (293) - is situated "four miles from Jefferson" ("Old People," 203). It includes cabins for black tenant farmers on the land, as well as the blacksmith shop where Sam worked. In "Old People" it is basically identical to the Compson farm in "A Justice," which explains where we locate it on our maps of the two stories. In "The Bear" Faulkner adds the detail of the room inside the big house which the boy's father "called the office": there all of the plantation business was transacted" and there the boy listens to "the best of talking" when the white men who are "hunters" and "know the woods" discuss hunting (293). Interestingly, when Faulkner recreates this place in Go Down, Moses, he draws a much deeper line between the 'office' - called the 'commissary' in the novel - and the woods.