cotton+house

A cabin, typically on a plantation, intended specifically for the storage of cotton before it is taken to be further processed (ginned).



For Joe Christmas, the cotton house is a hiding place, specifically where he exchanges his shoes for those of a black man's brogans, which allows him to evade the authorities that are pursuing him in connection with Joanna Burden's death. The cotton house is a space that seems to resonate with Christmas' interstitial identity. While it represents black space, it offers Christmas refuge and safety rather than the threat and loathing he has experienced in other black spaces. While the cotton house is a place where raw material awaits processing, Christmas inhabits the space for the purposes of inversion--to assume (however briefly) an identity that he has failed to purge himself of throughout the earlier sections of the novel.

//They followed it and came onto a road, which they followed behind the lowheaded and eager dogs who, after a short distance, swung to the roadside where a path came down from a cotton house in a nearby field//. (LIA 328)

//She told them about the white man on the road about daylight and how he had swapped shoes with her, taking in exchange a pair of her husband's brogans which she was wearing at the time. The sheriff listened. "That happened right by a cotton house, didn't it?" he said. She told him Yes.// (LIA 329)

//At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cottonhouse when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed.// (LIA 331)