Both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses agree that Lucas has had his moonshine still in the same "secret place" on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation for two decades. The short story locates it "in the creek bottom" (215). The novel says it's "not a mile from Zack Edmonds' kitchen door" (34).
The narrative locates the place where Lucas hides his dismantled moonshine still "farther into the [creek] bottom" than the place where he had originally set it up (215). The deputy sheriff who finds it while looking for George Wilkins' still calls it "a brier brake in the creek bottom," and says it is "just where [he] would hide a still" if he were one of Edmonds' Negro tenant farmers (217).
Both the main gate to the Edmonds plantation and, apparently, Lucas Beauchamp's cabin are on one of Yoknapatawpha county's main roads. In other texts it is called the northeast road; here it is simply identified as running "pale and dim" between the plantation's cotton fields (213).
The "big house" where Roth Edmonds lives at the center of his property is at the end of a "private road [that] mounts among oaks to [a] crest" (213). It is "seventeen miles" from Jefferson (218). In this text readers only get as close to it as Lucas does, when he stands "on the ground" and knocks on the front of the "veranda" to summon his landlord (214).
"Stable" may imply horses for most people, but the stable on Roth Edmonds' plantation seems more like a barn (218). Edmonds clearly owns the stable, and when Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in the novel Go Down, Moses he also made it clear that Edmonds owns the mules stabled inside it.
Like Lucas Beauchamp, George Wilkins lives in a tenant house on Roth Edmonds' plantation. To hear his wife Nat tell it, Wilkins' house is in very bad shape: she calls it "dat house whar de back porch is done already fall off of" and complains that because there is no stove and no well, she has to cook in the chimney and walk half a mile for water (220). Much of the narrative revolves around Nat's desire for George to fix the place up, at her father's expense; it does not seem as if the landlord has any obligation to do so.
Lucas Beauchamp lives, with his wife and daughter Nat, in a tenant house on Roth Edmonds' plantation. It sits uphill from the stable, and contains at least three rooms: "the room where he and his wife slept" (215), "the room where his daughter slept" (215), and a "kitchen" (223); it also has an unenclosed "back porch" (216).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Tue, 2016-07-12 17:05
In Flags in the Dust the Benbows are identified as one of the oldest and most prominent Yoknapatawpha families, though they do not figure among the county's large plantation owners. In this story they appear only as the antebellum owners of a "carriage" and the slave - "Uncle Cash," or Cassius - who drove it (199).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Tue, 2016-07-12 17:03
In a striking parenthetical aside, Bayard describes how Mrs. Compson's husband "would gather up eight or ten little niggers" from among the slaves on his plantation and shoot sweet potatoes off their heads with a rifle (193). It is not clear if Bayard saw this with his own eyes, but he does add that "they would stand mighty still" (193). It's also not clear which Mr. Compson this could be.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Tue, 2016-07-12 17:00
The "scrip dollar" that replaces Confederate money in Jefferson is "drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County" (199). All we see of this functionary in the story is his "neat clerk's hand[writing]" (199), but presumably he is one of the Northerners working in the defeated South for one of the Reconstruction agencies.
