The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "Smoke" Faulkner invents the town of Battenburg (31), locating it for his fictional purposes somewhere between Jefferson and Memphis, in either Mississippi or Tennessee.

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 in "Smoke" 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).

Located back in the hills in "Smoke," this is the "dirt-floored, two room cabin" where Anselm Holland Jr. lives "like a hermit, doing his own cooking" (5). There are dozens of cabins in the fictions, but only three are explicitly "dirt-floored," which seems to suggest an extraordinary degree of poverty - or perhaps just rusticity. And in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group the folks who live, as Anselm does, in the hills are often extremely poor.

The family cemetery of Cornelia Mardis is located in the cedar grove on the farm. In the course of the story "Smoke" it is the scene of a grave violation, a beating and a murder - at the hands of three different characters.

"Two thousand acres of some of the best land in the county" - that's how "Smoke" describes the property at the heart of this story's conflict (21). It originally belonged to the father of Cornelia Mardis; after his death it remains in her name, but on her death her husband, Anselm Holland, comes into "full possession" of it (3). However, he only holds it "in trust" for their twin sons (5).