Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Sat, 2013-06-01 18:33
Ten of the jurors who serve with Mr. Fentry in the Bookwright trial are unnamed, but they are described as "farmers and store-keepers" (91) - and unanimous in their desire to acquit Bookwright.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Sat, 2013-06-01 18:22
This is one of several boarding houses in Jefferson that appear in different texts. In Faulkner's last book, The Reivers, he calls it the Commercial Hotel, locates it "across town from the Holston House" - a higher class establishment (25), and provides it with a very colorful history. In 1905, when the main events of the novel take place, it's where Boon Hogganbeck lives along with jurors in town for trials and "horse- and mule-traders" (25).
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Sat, 2013-06-01 18:21
There are different kinds of mills in the Yoknapatawpha fictions - including grist mills, corn mills and molasses mills - but the one in Frenchman's Bend that the Quicks own is undoubtedly a sawmill, one of several around the county. Turning trees into lumber is one of the staples of the Yoknapatawpha economy.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 18:14
Mrs. Pruitt is the widow of a farmer and the Fentry's closest neighbor. Along with her son, she tells part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin solve the mystery of why Fentry voted to convict Bookwright in the killing of Buck Thorpe.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 18:12
Rufus Pruitt, the closest neighbor to the Fentry's, is a working-class farmer, the son of sharecroppers. Along with his mother, he narrates part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin to understand the behavior of Stonewall Jackson Fentry.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 17:53
Jackson Fentry is a farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," is the lone juror who holds out against acquitting a man named Bookwright for killing Buck Thorpe after Thorpe seduced his seventeen-year-old daughter. Fentry's behavior prompts Gavin Stevens to spend the story investigating the past that led to this event. Gavin discovers that Buck is the son Fentry adopted decades earlier, the illegitimate child of a young, pregnant, poor-white woman Fentry took in and married just before she died.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 17:49
Buck Thorpe (who was named "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" for the first three years of his life, 100) is the young man whom Bookwright shoots for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter. Born to a homeless poor-white woman given shelter by Jackson Fentry, he is raised by Fentry until age three, when he is reclaimed by his mother's family, the Thorpes. He grows up to be the ne'er do well Buck who appears in Frenchman's Bend "from nowhere," and is described as "a brawler, a gambler," a moonshiner and a cattle thief (90).
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 15:01
The Pruitts' place in "Tomorrow" adjoins the Fentry farm, thus locating it in the same northeastern part of Yoknapatawpha. Chick Mallison describes the property: "The next mailbox was within the mile [of Fentry's], and this time the house was even painted, with beds of petunias beside the steps, and the land about it was better" (95).
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2013-05-31 14:57
Fentry's place in "Tomorrow" is a farm located 30 miles away from Frenchman's Bend, "at the very other end" of Yoknapatawpha (90). Chick Mallison describes the place: "We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt corn and cotton which somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time. Then we saw the mailbox, the crude lettering: G.A.
