Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:53
Like Atlanta in Georgia, Chattanooga in Tennessee was one of the major rail centers in the Confederacy, and a prized target for the Union Army. There were a number of battles around and for it during 1862 and 1863. Union forces occupied the city in September, 1863, which is the background to the way Drusilla mentions the city in The Unvanquished (96).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:47
The main depot for the railroad that John Sartoris builds is located on the edge of Jefferson. This is where the first train in Yoknapatawpha history arrives, with Sartoris himself driving and "blowing blast after blast" on the whistle (225-26). There is also a "flag station" - i.e. a spot where a train will stop to pick up a passenger, if flagged to do so - near the Sartoris mansion; this is the location from which Drusilla leaves Yoknapatawpha at the end of the novel (252).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:40
Charleston is where Fort Sumter is located, and where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. Located on the Atlantic coast and an important shipping route, Charleston relied on ships captained by "blockade runners" during the war who sneaked through the Union naval blockade to bring goods to the Confederacy (244). Aunt Jenny calls these seamen "heroes in a way" (244).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:32
In The Sound and the Fury, Spoade is from South Carolina. In addition to the fact that according to Quentin he has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), his geographic heritage helps explain why Gerald Bland's mother feels obliged to associate her and her son with him.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:29
The "hill man" whom John Sartoris shoots while the railroad is being built lived with his wife and "several children" in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, "the hills" typically means the area to the east of Jefferson, where both the soil and the farmers are poor. A "dirt-floored" cabin would be a particularly poor one.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:26
Various locations in Georgia are Locations in 7 different Yoknapatawpha fictions, but in each case the context is military history. In one case, in the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote for The Sound and the Fury, the fighting takes place during the Revolutionary War: Charles Stuart Compson vanishes "from one of Tarleton's regiments on a Georgia battlefield" in 1778 (326; see "Georgia in the Revolutionary War" in this index).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:10
In The Unvanquished, the "hill man" whom John Sartoris shoots while the railroad is being built lived with his wife and "several children" in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, "the hills" typically means the area to the east of Jefferson, where both the soil and the farmers are poor. A "dirt-floored" cabin would be a particularly poor one.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 15:05
Accompanied some of the time by Buck McCaslin, Bayard and Ringo spend over fifty days riding in pursuit of Grumby. They get as far south and west as "down toward Grenada" (162) and as far east as Alabama (181), though on the whole the chase seems to stay close to if not within Yoknapatawpha. Bayard says "You could have put a silver dollar down on the geography page with the center of it at Jefferson and we would have never ridden out from under it" (164).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2016-04-01 14:59
While chasing Grumby and his men, Bayard, Ringo and Uncle Buck come across a house the gang has burned "where the ashes were still smoking," and a "woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away like a locust from across the pasture" and a boy "still unconscious in the stable with his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a wire snapper on the whip" (163). Bayard later mentions that this was "in Alabama" (181).
