Ramshackle House|Mrs. Down's House (Location Key)

Like the mobs and the funeral parlors, another echo between Sanctuary and Intruder in the Dust is this curious location. At least, we assume it's essentially a location, not two. In the earlier novel, after Ruby Lamar is driven from the Benbow house by Narcissa and the hotel by the church ladies, Horace finds a place for her to stay at "the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to manufacture spells for negroes" (200). In the later novel, Mrs. Downs is an "old white woman" who makes her living telling fortunes, curing hexes and finding lost things for a black clientele; she lives in "a small filthy shoebox of a house that smells like a foxden in a settlement of Negro houses" (69).