Quarters at the Unnamed Family's Farm (Location Key)

The white family for whom Sam Fathers works in the magazine version of "The Old People" is not named. Here too, as in "A Justice" and Go Down, Moses, Sam lives "among Negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins" (203). This story calls the larger property a "farm" (203), and the Negroes who work on it are tenant farmers or sharecroppers, but its layout suggests the design of a slave plantation, where the slaves lived in the 'quarters' somewhere behind the owners' big house. Although this story doesn't use the word 'quarters,' the two other texts that refer to Sam's cabin - the earlier "A Justice," where he lives on the Compson farm, and the slightly revised version of this story that Faulkner publishes in Go Down, Moses, where he works for the McCaslins and the Edmondses, both do. In the latter text, for example, Faulkner revises the phrase to read "a cabin among the other cabin in the quarters" (161). (Each of those "quarters" has its own entry in the index, reflecting the way Faulkner moves it from family to family as well as place to place.)