Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Tue, 2013-10-15 15:42
The Burdens are abolitionists who come to Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction to work for the rights of newly emancipated slaves. Nonetheless, the home they move into is an "old colonial plantation house" at the center of an antebellum slave plantation (36). Now Joanna, the last surviving member of the family, lives there alone, "in a lonely house in a neighborhood populated, when at all, by negroes" (258). The entire property has fallen into decay even before the big house burns to the ground.
Referred to by Simon simply as a "section hand" (7), this railroad worker is apparently the only witness to Young Bayard's 1919 return to Jefferson from World War I. It seems that he told Simon about it, and Simon in turn tells Old Bayard.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2013-10-10 15:39
Throughout Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction, expectant fathers fleeing their responsibilities go to Texas, or are thought to head for it (as a character thinks of Lucas Burch, 13), while others go there in order to obscure the circumstances of a illegitimate pregnancy (as Flem and Eula do in The Hamlet). Nathaniel Burden tries to get married here, but ends up getting "mixed up with helping some Rangers" (247).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2013-10-10 15:26
Texas plays a quasi-mythical role in Yoknapatawpha's history. While most of the people in the county arrive there from the East, there are two sets of inhabitants who come east to Yoknapatawpha from Texas. Four different fictions tell the story of the "spotted horses" that Flem Snopes brings to Frenchman's Bend from Texas, and that the hapless men who buy them unleash upon the county. The horses are invariably associated with a kind of frontier violence and wildness, but they are not the most dangerous creatures who come to Yoknapatawpha from Texas.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2013-10-10 15:26
Arkansas is directly across the Mississippi River from Mississippi. The "company" of Confederate troops camped outside Jefferson in "Retreat" and The Unvanquished come from the state (20, 46). Only four people from Yoknapatawpha go there.
