The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The deputy sheriff's wife cuts off his narrative, ending the short story with the line: "I'm going to clear this table then and I'm going to the picture show" (152).

The novel does not specify the location of the party that the deputy's wife attends, but we speculate that it is at a house somewhere in Jefferson, where members could meet easily and regularly.

The county jail is in Jefferson close to the Courthouse Square. It is at least two stories high with a holding cell upstairs furnished with iron cots. After throwing one of those cots against the wall, Rider ”grabs holt of that steel barred door and rips it out of the wall, bricks hinges and all, and walks out of the cell” (151). Also: Samuel Worsham Beauchamp spends a year "in and out" of this jail (354), and then eventually escapes from it too, but presumably in a less dramatic way.

In the kitchen of his house, the deputy sheriff retells Rider’s story to his (the deputy's) wife while she shuttles back and forth between the kitchen and dining room. We do not have any clues as to the location of the house, but speculate that it is in town and not far from the jailhouse.

This "negro schoolhouse about two miles from the sawmill" is the location where lynched Rider's body is found, "hanging from the bell rope" that would have been pulled to call the children into school in the morning (147).

The place Rider goes to buy a jug of whiskey is located "in the river swamp four miles away - another clearing, itself not much larger than a room, a hut, a hovel partly of planks and partly of canvas" (140). It seems that the moonshiner who sells him the whiskey lives here.

The river swamp where the moonshiner lives in "Pantaloon in Black" is one of the locations in which Rider wanders restlessly between "the close walls of impenetrable cane-stalks" which seem to close in on him, the oppressive "unbreathing blackness" (141).