"Courthouse Square is the physical, political and social center of Yoknapatawpha. It appears in the majority of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. Lucius uses "around the Square" as his point of reference for the "grocery and hardware and farmers' supply stores" from which he collects money every Saturday as an employee of his father's livery stable (3, 4). In this project we use the Square as the Location for places in Jefferson that cannot be more specifically located.
"Maury Priest's livery stable" (11) provides the people and businesses of Jefferson with a variety of services: distributing "boxes and cases of freight" from the railroad depot to the town's stores (4), taxiing people from the depot to the hotels or home from the opera house (8), and so on. The day and night foremen are white, but otherwise the staff - drivers, hostlers, blacksmith and stall cleaners - are mostly black. In addition to the stable, it contains an office and a harness room.
Submitted by crieger@semo.edu on Wed, 2015-10-21 18:00
The name of the man Quentin's narrative calls "Grandfather" is never given in this story, but he appears in eleven other Yoknapatawpha texts, and several of them, including the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, identify the full name of the paternal grandfather of the Compson children as "Jason Lycurgus Compson II." While he is deceased at the time Quentin Compson is narrating "A Justice," he would take his grandchildren to the Compson family farm "every Saturday afternoon" (343).
Hardwick is the seat of the county with Parsham in it, and thirteen miles away from the town. The County Sheriff's office, with its jail, is located there.
The store where Ned makes his purchase in The Reivers is one of two in Parsham. It is "across the tracks" from the hotel, on "what would have been the other side of the Square if Parsham ever got big enough to have a Square" (256).
The doctor who treats Lucius in The Reivers lives "about a mile" outside of Parsham (184). His office is in his house, "a little once-white house in a little yard filled with . . . rank-growing, rank-smelling dusty flowers" (185-86).
