The novel gets slightly ahead of history when the characters at Miss Reba's talk about the city zoo "in Overton Park" (108). The Memphis zoo is in that park, but didn't open until 1906, the year after the story takes place.
What Boon calls "a kind a boarding house" is of course a brothel (93). Miss Reba's is in "Catalpa Street" - a "side street, almost a back alley" - "in a small grassless yard but with a sort of lattice vestibule like a well house at the front door" (137, 94, 96). Readers of Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) will recognize the vestibule and the rest of Miss Reba's. In The Reivers it is decidedly less shady: there is a homelike quality to the way the 'girls' who work there are treated by Miss Reba and Mr. Binford, though the place's pretensions to gentility often wear thin.
Lucius' description of downtown Memphis is based on his previous visit to the city. It includes "the tall buildings, the stores, the hotels" (94). He mentions three real hotels by name: the Gaston, the Peabody and the Gayoso. On that earlier trip Lucius and his family stayed at the Gayoso, a Memphis landmark since 1843. It finally closed in 1962, the year The Reivers was published. Based on census figures, in 1905 the city's population would have been around 120,000.
When the travelers reach Memphis, the road turns into a "wide tree-bordered and ordered boulevard with [trolley] car tracks in the middle" (93). The street is not named in the novel, but Faulkner is probably thinking of Lamar Avenue.
When the travelers in The Reivers reach Memphis, the road turns into a "wide tree-bordered and ordered boulevard with [trolley] car tracks in the middle" (93). The street is not named in the novel, but Faulkner is probably thinking of Lamar Avenue.
The Tennessee road that Lucius calls a "broad highway" is not paved, but it is "graded and smoothed" and "heavily marked with wheel prints," many from other automobiles (91). It passes through towns at frequent intervals.
Where the "country road" that leads to Memphis crosses the "swampy creek" with its infernal name (80). The creek itself is bridged, but to reach it a car has to get across a muddy morass, cultivated "like a patch" of cotton by the man who lives beside it, and charges cars a fee to pull them out of the mud (84).
This is where the "country road" that leads to Memphis crosses the "swampy creek" with its infernal name (80). The creek itself is bridged, but to reach it the travelers in The Reivers have to cross a muddy morass in the creek bottom. This is cultivated "like a patch" of cotton by the man who lives beside it, and charges cars a fee to pull them out of the mud (84).
The iron bridge that now (i.e. in 1905) spans the Tallahatchie River is still new enough to be known in Yoknapatawpha as "THE Iron Bridge" (71). Previously crossing the river meant using the ferry that was first put into service by a man named Wylie, then taken over by Ballenbaugh. "Wylie's Crossing" was "the only crossing within miles" for people who wanted to travel into or out of Yoknapatawpha from or to the north, toward Memphis, and it was also "the head of navigation" for the steamboats that once came upriver eastward from the Mississippi (72).
