The road between Jefferson and the town containing the "college" (i.e., Oxford, 143) runs between and over a series of hills. Alongside the road "sparse negro cabins squat on the slopes," surrounded by "warped farmed implements," huddled in "the shiftless fashion of negroes" (145).
The road between Oxford and Jefferson really runs between Faulkner's experience and his fiction, but it is also traveled frequently by a number of characters in that fiction. In Absalom, Absalom! for example, Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon make a number of trips between Sutpen's Hundred and the college they attend in Oxford. Only two texts, however, actually include events that take place in the space between the real Oxford and the imagined Yoknapatawpha.
When Old Bayard finds his ancestor's rapier in the chest of family relics, he thinks of the first Sartoris in the new world, raising tobacco and fighting "his stealthy and simple neighbors" (88). That ancestor lived in Carolina (whether North or more probably South is never specified), and the adjectives "stealthy and simple" make it almost certain that he is thinking about the Indians who were ab-originally on that scene.
