Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:23
The orchard at the Sartoris plantation serves both practical and aesthetic purposes. As a practical matter, the orchard provides food as well as a place to bury the family silver to hide it from Union soldiers. The orchard also provides a natural aesthetic enhancement to the plantation; like a formal garden, the orchard helps to elevate the cultural status of the plantation’s owners. Judging from the movements of Bayard and Ringo in this story, the Sartoris plantation orchard appears to be between the main house and the driveway gate on the "big road" that passes the place.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:22
Bayard and Ringo follow Loosh as far as the road and hear the mule he's riding going away to "where Corinth" is (8). The road is the one that runs north and south through the middle of Yoknapatawpha. To get to Corinth, Loosh goes north. Corinth is about sixty miles away from Sartoris; Loosh has already given the boys reason to think the Yankees are in that direction.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:20
The pasture on a plantation is typically a large grassy area for livestock. In this story, the pasture seems to wrap around the house on several sides. It is described as being between the Sartoris plantation main house and the woods and creek bottom, and later, the boys Bayard and Ringo cross it running from the cedar copse back to the house.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:18
As a working farm, the Sartoris plantation includes a number of work-related outbuildings, such as a smokehouse (used to preserve meats during the era before refrigeration), a kitchen (likely detached from the main house so as to minimize the threat of fire to the main house), a stable, and a barn and adjacent lot for livestock. Mississippi plantations also typically included other outbuildings, such as sheds and storehouses, a carriage house, a well or spring house, a laundry, and a dairy or milkhouse.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:14
A "kind of map" of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on which Bayard and Ringo play at war (3). It is located "behind the smokehouse" of the Sartoris plantation and is constructed using wood chips from the woodpile; the Mississippi River was made by trenching the ground with a hoe and filled with water from the well.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:08
"We killed him, Granny! At the gate!" (11, 27) - this is how Bayard Sartoris tells Miss Rosa about the Yankee soldier he and Ringo fired upon in "Ambuscade." They didn't really kill him, but Bayard's phrase provides an interested echo of the mystery that begins Absalom, Absalom!, which Faulkner was writing at the same time as "Ambuscade." In the novel it's Henry Sutpen who does shoot his sister's "fiance to death before the gates to the house" (6).
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:05
A group of Eastern redcedar trees, an evergreen tree with a fragrant heartwood, provides Bayard and Ringo in The Unvanquished with the place from which they can watch the road for Yankees without fear of being seen. Though this copse of trees may be a natural occurrence, cedars were often planted in cemeteries as well. This copse is described as "cool and shady" (9, 24).
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:04
The creek that flows beyond the pasture at the Sartoris plantation appears in a dozen different texts. It's not always named, but when it is it is - as in the title of one of the Faulkner's stories about the Sartorises during the Civil War - it is called "Harrykin Creek," although officially it's Hurricane Creek (a real creek in Lafayette County). It first appears in those stories as the location of the livestock pen that Colonel Sartoris builds in order to hide his animals from the Yankee army.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:03
The orchard at the Sartoris plantation appears in four texts about the family during the Civil War, and in that context it's mainly the place where the Sartorises keep burying and un-burying the family valuables, to keep them out of the hands of the Yankees whom they expect are coming. When the Union troops do show up, in "Retreat," the slave named Loosh shows them "where the silver is buried" (74). Before and after the war a plantation orchard near the big house would have served both a decorative sign of status and a functional source of fruit like apples or pears.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Sat, 2013-07-13 02:01
Like the Compsons, the Sartorises have a pasture next to their big house - though theirs is never sold and turned into a golf course. Like the entire Sartoris plantation, it's intact and prosperous through the middle of the 20th century, despite the threats of time and loss, and is mentioned in 6 different texts. Five of these are set during the Civil War. In "My Grandmother Millard" Colonel Sartoris uses the pasture to drill the Confederate regiment he has raised from the local population.
