The once well-traveled road to the Old Frenchman place is "hardly a road" now; there remains "no trace" of the bridge that had crossed the creek decades earlier, when the place was a prosperous ante bellum plantation (373). The narrative calls the road an "old scar almost healed now," as nature reclaims the landscape (373), but there also seems to be some nostalgia in the way it recalls the people - slaves and body-servants, "women . . . in hooped crinoline" and "men in broadcloth" (373) - who had traveled up and down it during those days.
The place where the Tulls and their two mules run into Eck Snopes' spotted horse is a one-lane wooden bridge over a creek "a quarter of a mile" away from the village (335).
As they approach town in The Hamlet, the surrey carrying Mink Snopes and the lawmen leaves the "flatlands" and enters another region of "hills" and "pines" (283). On one of the trees is a kind of billboard, "a board . . . bearing a merchant's name above the legend 'Jefferson 4 mi'" (284). It is at this point that Mink desperately tries to kill himself.
It's likely that characters in several fictions travel this road, to get to Whiteleaf or beyond Yoknapatawpha to Alabama. But only one noteworthy event occurs on the road. As the surrey carrying Mink Snopes and his captors approaches town in The Hamlet, it leaves the "flatlands" and enters another region of "hills" and "pines" (283). On one of the trees is a kind of billboard, "a board . . . bearing a merchant's name above the legend 'Jefferson 4 mi'" (284). It is at this point that Mink desperately tries to kill himself.
The "agricultural college" that Hoake McCarron attends, and the town it's in, where he spends a year "without even matriculating," could be anywhere (151). And his behavior during the 17 months he spends there suggests Hoake was not particularly interested in anything the college had to teach. 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 text gives us no clues about where to locate the "military boarding school" that Hoake McCarron attends (151). There is only one such school in Mississippi, an academy in Port Gibson that was established in 1830. We are using that to provide a location, but Faulkner may have been thinking of many other possible schools and places.
