The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Mottstown is the location where, as Faulkner wrote when he located the town on his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha, "Jason Compson lost his nieces's trail (in The Sound and the Fury), and where Anse Bundren and his boys had to go in order to reach Jefferson (in As I Lay Dying)." I.O. Snopes also mentions Mottstown in Chapter 16 of The Town concerning the mule in the yard. In The Unvanquished it is the site of a Union regiment's encampment, where Ringo goes to scout for mules that Granny later steals using forged paperwork.

The spot on the road where the Union soldiers catch Bayard and Granny is surrounded by woods on either side. When Ringo distracts the soldiers, "there was a big noise of bushes and trees like a cyclone was going through them" (132).

The church that seems to have been built for the big plantations that lie in the northern half of Yoknapatawpha. The Sartoris family has a pew in the front of it, and around the walls there is a gallery large enough for 200 Negroes.

The desolate hideout of Grumby and his Independents is "located on the Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away" from the Sartoris Plantation (151). Bayard describes the abandoned cotton compress as "the huge rotting building with the gray afternoon dying wetly upon it, and then at the end of the hall a faint crack of light beneath a door" (153).

The place between Mottstown and the Sartoris place where Ab Snopes hides the mules that Miss Rosa has stolen from the Union Army. There is a real Hickahala Creek in Mississippi, halfway between Oxford and Memphis. If we were sure Faulkner had this real creek in mind, this would be one of the strongest clues he provides to the relative positions of the real Oxford and his imaginary Jefferson - that is, Jefferson would also be between Oxford and Memphis, and about 20 miles north of Hickahala Creek But we cannot be sure about this.

When Colonel Sartoris writes to tell his family where he and his troop are "fighting" (189) and when Louisa Hawk writes Granny to say that she has just found out where Drusilla is (149), apparently they both say "Carolina," without specifying which Carolina. In the late fall of 1864, it's most likely South Carolina, where Sherman and his army were completing their March to the Sea.

This site represents several locations on the roads that Rosa Millard and her party take through Alabama and into Mississippi on their return trip to the Sartoris plantation.

This site near and beyond the Mississippi-Alabama border represents the journey "along that big broad empty road between the burned houses and gins and fences" (83). Bayard tells us that "Before it had been like passing through a country where nobody had ever lived; now it was like passing through one where everybody had died at the same moment" (84). Nights three, four and five, the group is constantly wakened by passing groups of former slaves; on the morning of the sixth day, Rosa discovers a black woman and her infant child who were left behind by one of these groups.

During their second day, Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo travel for a long while through hills and "a country" where "nobody seemed to live at all" (81). "But after a while the hills stopped, the road ran out flat and straight" until "the road we were on ran square into a big broad one running straight on into the east" (82). On this road, they travel by "a burned house like ours; three chimneys standing above a mound of ashes" with a white woman and child "looking at us from a cabin behind them" (82).

Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo head directly into the rising sun on their way to Alabama. This icon represents the site where, after driving "until dark," they camp for the first night on the road (80).