The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The office of the "county newspaper" sits across the square from Gavin Stevens' office (355). The newspaper is edited by Mr. Wilmoth.

The dilapidated Worsham house sits on the edge of town. It has a "paintless front door," and "the entire house was still lighted with oil lamps and there was no running water in it" (360-61). Belle Worsham, the current proprietor, inherited the house from her father, Samuel Worsham. Mollie Beauchamp, Hamp Worsham, his wife, Belle Worsham, and - at least for a few moments - Gavin Stevens gather in a "clean, spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odor of old maidens" to mourn Samuel Worsham Beauchamp's death (361).

Hamp and his wife live behind the dilapidated Worsham house, where they help Belle Worsham raise chickens and vegetables for market. The Worsham family is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha, and Hamp is "descended from one of [the family's] slaves" (356). It is likely that the cabin in which he lives was originally built as a slave cabin.

Gavin Stevens' law office is located on Jefferson's Courthouse Square. Stevens can hear clients ascending and descending the stairs that lead to his office, and he can hear the wind blow through the leaves of a mulberry tree just outside his window. His office sees a steady stream of "officials from the city hall, and justices of the peace and bailiffs" (360).

The opening scene of the "Go Down, Moses" section of the novel takes place in a cell in the Illinois state penitentiary in "Joliet" (357). The cell is is described as a "steel crucible," with a "steel cot," a "steel stool," and a "steel door" (351, 352). An armed guard stands outside of it. Later in the story, Gavin Stevens calls the warden of this penitentiary. While there is a famous prison in Joliet, Faulkner was probably thinking of the nearby Stateville Penitentiary, which was the site of executions by electric chair from 1928 onward.

As the hunters in the story drive west and south to reach a surviving patch of American wilderness, they talk and think about the way the "old-world" is being engulfed by war (337). Hitler is mentioned (322) and Ike reflects on the way the cotton grown on the Delta will be used by Europeans "to shoot at one another" (337).

Vicksburg, a city on steep bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, is mentioned several times in the novel. In "The Fire and the Hearth," Nat Beauchamp goes to visit her aunt there when her family gets in trouble with the authorities over their whisky-making. In "Delta Autumn," the unnamed young mother of Roth Edmonds' child also has an aunt who lives there. In 1940 there were about 25,000 people living in the city.

Roth Edmonds' unnamed lover tells Ike that until two years ago, she lived with her parents "in Indianapolis" (343). Indianapolis is both the capital and the largest city in Indiana, and its population is about one-quarter African-American.

Leland, Mississippi, the town where the young mother will take a train north, is a majority black town in the heart of the Delta region.

Beginning in January Roth Edmonds and his mistress "went West, to New Mexico," where they lived together for six weeks (341).