The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Bayard and Ringo follow Loosh as far as the road and hear the mule he's riding going away to "where Corinth" is (22). The road is the one that runs north and south through the middle of Yoknapatawpha. To get to Corinth, Loosh goes north. Corinth is about sixty miles away from Sartoris; Loosh has already given the boys reason to think the Yankees are in that direction.

When talking to the Yankee Lieutenant in "Riposte in Tertio," Ringo mentions "the quarters" that are "back yonder" behind the destroyed big house on the Sartoris plantation (142), but that larger area is never described. Only two of the cabins in the quarters are depicted in the novel. Before the Yankees burn the white family's mansion, this is the cabin occupied by Joby and Louvinia. Given Joby's seniority, his cabin is likely the one closest to the main house.

The pasture on a plantation is typically a large grassy area for livestock. In this story, the pasture seems to wrap around the house on several sides. It is described as being between the Sartoris plantation main house and the woods and creek bottom.

As a working farm, the Sartoris plantation includes a number of work-related outbuildings, such as a smokehouse (used to preserve meats during the era before refrigeration), a kitchen (likely detached from the main house so as to minimize the threat of fire to the main house), a stable, and a barn and adjacent lot for livestock. Mississippi plantations also typically included other outbuildings, such as sheds and storehouses, a carriage house, a well or spring house, a laundry, and a dairy or milkhouse.

Tennessee is the state immediately to the north of Mississippi, about 60-70 miles from the approximate location of Yoknapatawpha County. The state was the location of some of the fiercest fighting in the western theater of the Civil War, especially the battle of Shiloh, which took place April 6-7, 1862, just twenty miles north of Corinth, Mississippi. Although that battle gave the Union Army effective control of the state, and Memphis was occupied by the Yankees by early June, 1862, fighting in Tennessee continues through much of the novel.

A "living map" of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on which Bayard and Ringo play at war. It is located "behind the smokehouse" of the Sartoris plantation and is constructed of "just a handful of chips from the woodpile"; the "Mississippi River" has been "scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe" and filled with water fetched from the well (3).

The apple orchard on the Sartoris plantation serves both practical and aesthetic purposes. As a practical matter, the orchard provides food as well as a place to bury the family silver to hide it from Union soldiers. The orchard also provides a natural aesthetic enhancement to the plantation; like a formal garden, the orchard helps to elevate the cultural status of the plantation’s owners. Judging from the movements of Bayard and Ringo in this story, the Sartoris plantation orchard appears to be between the main house and the driveway gate on the “big road” that passes the place.

In the local vernacular, "creek bottom" refers to the land along the sides of a creek; it is typically densely overgrown. At Sartoris the creek runs through the woods beyond the plantation’s pasture (142), near enough to be convenient but far enough away from the main house that it can serve as a suitable place to hide livestock from Union forces.

A group of Eastern red cedar trees, an evergreen tree with a fragrant heartwood. Though this copse of trees may be a natural occurrence, cedars were often planted in cemeteries as well. This copse is described as "cool and shady" (24), and it appears to provide the boys a place from which they can watch the road without fear of being seen but is within sight of the kitchen from which Louvinia can watch the children.

The gate to the Sartoris plantation is near a bend of the "big road" that leads south into Jefferson and north in the direction of Corinth. In the opening story of the novel, honeysuckle grows near the gate, providing Bayard and Ringo some cover as they lay in ambush for the approaching Yankee soldier on horseback. The gate opens into a drive that leads to the main house that seems to parallel (or possibly run through) the plantation’s orchard.