I don understand. Why does Joçint burn down the sawmill?
Joçint, half Native-American, half African-American, loves the freedom of hunting in the forest. But Morico, his father, forces him to work at the sawmill instead, a job he hates. In fury, he burns down the mill. There are implications in the novel that Joçint resents the presence of a white, industrial business man from the North (St. Louis) who is cutting down the trees in his beloved forest. Q: I’m not a native speaker of English and I struggle with the dialect in some passages of this novel. How and why, exactly, does Grégoire die? Are the reasons implied in the story? The conversation between Thérèse and Rufe Jimson contains dialect too heavy for me to understand. A: Grégoire is deeply in love with Hosmer’s sister, Melicent, but she rejects him. In despair, he goes to Texas, where he picks a fight with an armed man and is shot. The novel says: “You see it all riz out o’ a little altercation ’twixt him and Colonel Klayton in the colonel’s store. Some says he’d ben drinkin’; others
