The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This location represents the events that occur as Granny and her party slowly move across northern Mississippi and southwestern Tennessee toward Memphis. The four days of this journey - the nights spent sleeping in the wagon in the woods along the road, the meals taken in houses they pass - are mainly summarized, and the most memorable detail of the landscape is the one burned house they see. But the location also includes the crossroads where, on the fourth day of their trip, they are attacked by a band of marauders while passing a deserted house with a stable behind it.

On their return journey to Sartoris Bayard notes when they "pass the hole where Ringo and I learned to swim" (70).

According to Uncle Buck McCaslin, Sartoris gets "within spitting distance" (52) of the nation's capital while fighting for the Confederacy in Virginia.

Although Mississippi was in the western theater of the Civil War, John Sartoris and the regiment he raises from Yoknapatawpha travel to Virginia to do their fighting there; after he returns home, bringing the "captured musket" that hangs above the mantle at Sartoris (9), the regiment remains in the Civil War's eastern theater. In addition the novel notes that Uncle Buddy is "a sergeant in Tennant's brigade in Virginia" (51).

Just outside Jefferson the wagon carrying Granny, Bayard and Ringo passes by a troop of Confederate soldiers from Arkansas. At least, that is the most likely reason one of them yells "Hooraw for Arkansaw!" (46).

Although the Compson place is richly detailed in The Sound and the Fury, it remains essentially offstage in The Unvanquished. Granny as well as Bayard and Ringo go there to see and borrow items from Mrs. Compson. And in "Skirmish at Sartoris" there is an enigmatic reference to a 'Mr. Compson' who took enslaved children from "the quarters" and "lined them up across the creek" to shoot sweet potatoes off their heads for sport (193) - one can only wonder if this is the same "creek" where Caddy muddies her drawers in The Sound and the Fury.

This is a pasture "beside the road" just north of town, where a "company" of Confederate troops are bivouacked (46).

The square around the courthouse is the center of both Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, and appears often in Faulkner's fiction. In this novel it has to be "built back" after Union troops burn Jefferson during the Civil War (198).

Founded in 1819, Memphis, Tennessee, had over 20,000 residents in the 1860s, making it the closest big city to Yoknapatawpha. It is about seventy-five miles northwest of Jefferson. This the place that Colonel Sartoris tells Rosa Millard to "retreat" to early in the novel. Later, it is referred to as the place where Ab Snopes goes to sell back to the Union Army the mules that Granny and Ringo steal from various Yankee encampments in Mississippi.

Often referred to as "the other cabin," Loosh and Philadelphy’s cabin is one of at least two cabins in the plantation’s slave quarters. The story does not give any specifics about its location or condition, but it appears to be near Joby’s cabin, though probably not as close to the main house. When Union troops pass through Sartoris, Loosh and Phladelphy follow them toward freedom and the plantation house is destroyed. Bayard and Granny occupy the other cabin mentioned in the novel, while Joby, Louvinia, and Ringo move into this cabin.