The metal
corncrib, for instance, is outfitted with a self-cleaning, sloped bottom--and brakes, stop and turn lights.
In Sanctuary, "shucks" initially evokes Temple's rape, first as the corn-shucks in the mattress where she lies next to Gowan and spends the night in "comparative inviolation," and then as the shucks in the
corncrib, the scene of the actual rape (215).
With the dog locked up in Sam's
corncrib, food becomes the primary instrument in securing the animal's obedience.
In the fall we gather the nuts, spread them out on the floor of an empty portion of the
corncrib which was squirrel-proof, and after the outside shell had turned black and dry, we ran the nuts through our hand-cranked corn sheller.
Next to the stalls was a slatted
corncrib, where corn was stored on the cob.
As Temple is raped by Popeye, in a
corncrib behind the mansion, she equates the grotesque blind man Pap, one of many ghouls stalking the property, with her own father, damning Judge Drake's seeming authority and its uselessness against the evil that the agrarian fantasy elides: "She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes.
It wasn't until I saw what our neighbors did with their
corncrib that I knew what the answer to our problem was.
See "Build a Backyard
Corncrib," June/July 1999, or visit www.
Temple hears pounding footsteps both on the outside of the
corncrib and in the whorehouse.
They were led to the water tank next to the
corncrib and turned out to pasture.
Just as the white moonshiners have taken over and destroyed the former plantation house, it is equally symbolic that Temple's scene of degradation occurs at the hands of the white bootlegger/gangster in a
corncrib and with a corncob--the abject remains of the main ingredient in moonshine whiskey.
For those two hogs we saved for breeding, however, we relied on the remnants of grain left in the
corncrib.
