Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Fri, 2016-02-26 22:28
This "tremendous pre-Civil War plantation" has been abandoned "for thirty years now" at the time of the story (3, 4). During that time the small farmers who live nearby have been tearing it apart for firewood, so that now "the tremendous house" designed by an "imported and nameless architect" has been reduced to a "broken roof and topless chimneys and one high rectangle of window through which [one can] see the stars" (375). Its outbuildings and landscaping are also all in ruins.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 10:06
Courthouse Square sits at the center of Jefferson, and throughout Faulkner's fictions represents the center of Yoknapatawpha as well. It is lined by stores and law and medical offices. At the center of the Square sits the county courthouse, which contains the judge's office where Lucas and George are informally tried. It also houses the Chancery Clerk's books. Civil cases like the divorce Molly Beauchamp seeks are handled in the office of the Chancellor, "a small detached building beside the courthouse proper" (122).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 09:40
George Wilkins lives in one of the servant and tenant cabins on the McCaslin-Edmonds Place, one quarter of a mile from Lucas and Molly Beauchamp's cabin. According to his wife Nat's complaints, the cabin is "half a mile" from the spring where she has to get water, "the whole back porch is done already fell off" and it lacks a stove (67).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 09:36
Like Lucas Beauchamp, George Wilkins lives in a tenant house on Roth Edmonds' plantation. To hear his wife Nat tell it in "A Point of Law," Wilkins' house is in very bad shape: she calls it "dat house whar de back porch is done already fall off of" and complains that because there is no stove and no well, she has to cook in the chimney and walk half a mile for water (220).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 07:26
Because of the flooding described in Go Down, Moses, Zack Edmonds has to bury his wife Louisa in "the orchard" at his plantation (45). Many of Yoknapatawpha's big plantations, and even some of the bigger farms, have 'family graveyards' on their property, but apparently (like the Sartorises) the McCaslin-Edmonds place does not.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 07:18
This is the lane that, in the Harper's magazine version of "Pantaloon in Black," connects Rider and Mannie’s rented cabin, "the last one in the lane” (240), with the rest of Edmonds' property and the commissary where Mannie buys supplies. The description implies the existence of the other cabins along the lane, and so evokes the configuration of the antebellum plantation with its quarters for the enslaved workers.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 07:08
Go Down, Moses tells us that the country church that Roth attends is "five miles away" from the McCaslin-Edmonds place (119), but doesn't say in what direction. We speculate that it is still in Yoknapatawpha, west of Roth's property.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 07:01
The mound where "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter begins is described as "squat, flat-topped, almost symmetrical" (37). It rises out of the flat valley in which it stands four miles away from the McCaslin-Edmonds Place. There are a number of "Indian mounds" - to use the term that, as Faulkner indicates, was coined by white people (37) - in Mississippi and elsewhere along the rivers. The indigenous peoples of the Americas constructed such earthen mounds for religious and ceremonial, burial, and elite residential purposes.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-02-26 06:56
In the short story "A Point of Law" Lucas Beauchamp moves his dismantled moonshine still "farther into the [creek] bottom" to hide it from the officers he expects are coming to the McCaslin-Edmonds place (215). The deputy sheriff who finds it calls the hiding place "a brier brake in the creek bottom" (217).
