Bay St. Louis is a real town on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. In 1905 its population would have been about 3,000. When the young Lucius Priest asks Boon if he "knows the difference between Bay St. Louis and Mobile" (44). Mobile is in Alabama, not Mississippi, but he might also be thinking about the difference between a resort town like Bay St. Louis and a major port city. His mother's Lessep parents live, and his grandfather dies, in Bay St. Louis.
Bay St. Louis is a real town on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. In 1905, when it's mentioned in The Reivers, its population would have been about 3,000. The young Lucius Priest asks Boon if he "knows the difference between Bay St. Louis and Mobile" (44). Mobile is in Alabama, not Mississippi, but he might also be thinking about the difference between a resort town like Bay St. Louis and a major port city - about 40,000 people lived in Mobile in 1905. Lucius' mother's Lessep parents live, and his grandfather dies, in Bay St. Louis.
Lucius says that he should have recognized Boon's "outrageous dream" as soon as the older man mentions "New Orleans" (44). Presumably this is because, like Memphis, New Orleans was known to the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha for its decadence, as a place to misbehave in.
Court Square in Memphis, where Otis walks every day to the "fruit and peanut stand" run by "that I-talian wop" (139), was one of the four original parks laid out by the men who designed the city in 1819.
The real Union Station in Memphis was right where the novel says it is, between "Second and Third streets" (137). But Faulkner gets ahead of history when he uses it as a location for this story set in 1905, since the station - only two blocks from Memphis' older Central Station - didn't open until 1912. Boon and Lucius buy their tickets for Parsham inside the "depot" (161), but spend a lot more time in the trainyard: a "maze of loading platforms and tracks" in which stands the empty boxcar they load the horse into (141).
The real Union Station in Memphis was right where Faulkner says it is in The Reivers, between "Second and Third streets" (137). But Faulkner gets ahead of history when he uses it as a location for this story set in 1905, since the station didn't open until 1912. Mink Snopes could have spent a night sleeping inside its "hollowly sonorous rotunda," since that scene in The Mansion takes place in 1946 - except, of course, for the Memphis policeman who tells him to "Beat it" (317, 318).
The train station that Minnie refers to as "the Frisco depot" is likely the Calhoun Street Station, out of which the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway ran in 1905. (In 1914 the larger Central Station was built on the same site.)
The "driving park" where Otis and Mr. Binford went to bet on a race is probably the Montgomery Park race track (108). Horse and harness racing on a one-mile oval track began there in 1852. In 1906, when the state legislature outlawed gambling, the track was closed down.
"Birdie Watts's" is "across the street" from Miss Reba's (107). Though no one says so explicitly, it is clearly another brothel, one of at least several more in Memphis' famed red light district.
