The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A fictional town located between Jefferson and Memphis (31).

The closest big city to Jefferson, Memphis often appears Faulkner's fiction as the location of vice; in "Smoke" it is where the hitman is from.

"Smoke" is very clear that the drugstore on the Square in Jefferson where the killer purchases a pack of cigarettes is "West's drug store," and that it's owned by a man named West (28). It's not likely that there would be two drugstores on the Square, so we are assuming that this is the same business that figures as a location in a dozen other texts. In some of these it is not named, and in other's it is called 'Christian's.' "Smoke" is the only fiction in which it is called "West's."

Where Miss Emma Dukinfield visits and from where she brings the brass box home to her father.

The courthouse square includes the "yard" and roads surrounding the Courthouse in the center of town. Separated from the "courthouse proper" where the courtroom is located by a "flagged passage" where the negro janitor sits in a wire-mended splint chair is Judge Dukinfield's office in which there is a window, table, and chair. The office can also be reached by "the narrow private stair which led down from the courtroom, used only by the presiding judge during court term" (14).

The Jefferson house where Judge Dukinfield lives in "Smoke" is close enough to the Square for him to walk from it "daily" to his office in the courthouse (12). All the story says to help us locate it is that when he leaves the courthouse he "crosses the square" and goes "up the street" (13). Based on the judges throughout the fictions, however, we assume that he lives in the same upper-class residential neighborhood as, for example, the Benbows.

Located "four or five miles" from the Mardis-Holland property, Dodge's place is described as a "good farm," "though eaten up by mortgages" that Virginius Holland disencumbers with his savings when he moves there after his father tells him to leave home (8).

The "penitentiary" (6) to which Anselm Holland, Jr., is sent for making whiskey is almost certainly the Mississippi state penitentiary better known as Parchman Farm. It is a maximum-security prison that has been in operation since 1901.