Virginia was the scene of many of the great battles of the Civil War. Because his mother was from the state, in 1861 Anse walks "all the way" there from Mississippi, and as part of "Stonewall Jackson's army" fights in at least two of those battles: "the Valley" (a reference to Jackson's 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley), and "Chancellorsville," the 1863 battle in which Jackson was killed (54).
Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest large city to the area of Mississippi in which Faulkner locates Yoknapatawpha, and as such is often visited by many characters for many reasons throughout his fiction. In this story it is evoked both as the place where the McCallums sell the "horses and mules" they breed and raise (55), and as the place where Buddy tells his sons to go as "the quickest place to enlist" in the army (51). The location in Memphis he tells them to leave his truck - "the Gayoso Feed Company" (53) - links the two contexts together.
After the McCallum family decides to stop growing cotton, Buddy McCallum's twin sons "went off a year to the agricultural college to learn right about whiteface cattle" (57). The story gives no further details about this location, but since Mississippi State University has a College of Agriculture, we use its hometown, Starkville, as a way to put a spot on our map.
The county courthouse and the square that surrounds it sit at the center of Jefferson and throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions serve as the political and social center of the county. We also use it as the generic location for events that cannot be linked to a specific place, as here: when the doctor says someone can "drive my car to town" (51) or the investigator says he will "take these men back to Jefferson with me to answer this charge" (53).
In many of Faulkner's fictions, Jefferson's railroad station serves as the portal through which Yoknapatawpha is connected to the rest of the world. In this story the station is never explicitly mentioned, but Mr. Pearson - although he is driving the car at the start - says he already has a reservation "to take the night train back to Jackson" (48).
At the top of a slope behind the house, in "a small clump" of cedars "somehow shaggily formal against the starred sky," is the McCallums' family burial place (59). The story ends in this "small rectangle of earth enclosed by a low brick coping" (59). At present it contains only "two plain granite slabs set upright in the earth" marking the graves of "Old Anse and Mrs. Anse" (59-60). But the future resting places for the family's next two generations have already been determined, so Gombault knows where to put Buddy's leg.
The McCallums live in a "two-story house" (46). Although the narrator calls it a "rambling and paintless sprawl" (46), it suggests stability, strength and continuity with the past. The "first story of this house" dates back to the years immediately after the Civil War, when the family patriarch returned from fighting in Virginia and built it out of logs for his new wife and their large family (54).
The story begins next to "the dark bulk of the cotton gin" on the McCallum property (45). Before the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the family ginned the cotton they grew "right here in their own gin" (56), but after the federal government started giving farmers "advice and help, whether he wanted it or not," to quote the way Gombault refers to the new regulations governing agricultural production (55), the McCallums stopped growing cotton. The gin is no longer used, except to store the "twenty-two bales of orphan cotton" they refuse to sell under this New Deal (56).
At the top of a slope behind the McCallum house, in "a small clump" of cedars "somehow shaggily formal against the starred sky," is the McCallums' family burial place (59). "The Tall Men" ends in this "small rectangle of earth enclosed by a low brick coping" (59). At present it contains only "two plain granite slabs set upright in the earth" marking the graves of "Old Anse and Mrs. Anse" (59-60). But the future resting places for the family's next two generations have already been determined, so Gombault knows where to put Buddy's leg.
"The Tall Men" begins next to "the dark bulk of the cotton gin" on the McCallum property (45). A 'gin' is a machine that separates the cotton seeds from the cotton fibers that cloth is made from, and there are a number of them around Yoknapatawpha County. But it's unusual for a farm to have its own gin. The big Sartoris plantation does, with its tenants who work on various farms within the plantation, but the other gins in the fictions serve regions of the county.
