The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The woods and fields near the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation appear in both Rider's and Ike's stories. They are where Rider runs all of Sunday night and Monday morning until he goes to the sawmill. His dog overtakes "him within the first half mile. There was a moon then, their two shadows flitting broken and intermittent among the trees or slanted long and intact across the slope of pasture or old abandoned fields upon the hills" (135-36).

The home in which, we gather, Rider has spent most of his life before marrying Mannie. Behind it is a garden patch and a grassless yard where Rider would crawl as an infant before he learned to walk.

These are the woods Rider walks through to get home from the graveyard. From the graveyard he "crossed the road and entered the woods. It was middle dusk when he emerged from them and crossed the last field, stepping over that fence too in one stride, into the lane" (130-31).

Our one glimpse of this cemetery comes in "Pantaloon in Black," where we only see the African American section of what may be a segregated cemetery like others in Yoknapatawpha. Here the graves all resemble one another, "marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read" (129). Bordering the graveyard is a "three-strand wire fence" (130) that Rider steps over to cross the road and enter the woods.

The house, we are told, is "the last one in the lane, not his but rented from Carothers Edmonds, the local white landowner" (131). Rider has done a great deal of work on it in the six months he lived there with Mannie and on their wedding night he "built a fire on the hearth" just as "Uncle Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds' oldest tenant, had done on his forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since" (132). After Mannie’s death the house seems foreign and as he walks up to the gate he realizes "that there was nothing beyond it.

The sawmill where Rider works is one of several sawmills in Yoknapatawpha. During the scene set there in the morning, "the trucks are rolling" and we hear "the whine and clang of the saw," and the "grunting shouts" and "chanted phrases of song" of the Negro workmen (137).