In Go Down, Moses, the first novel in which Lucas Beauchamp appears, he lives in one of the "servant and tenant" cabins on the Edmunds place (8). But in this novel he owns both his house and the ten acres of land around it. The property was deeded to him by Carothers Edmunds' father, in recognition of the fact that Lucas is the (illegitimate, bi-racial) grandson of the same patriarch, the white planter Carothers McCaslin, whom the Edmunds family descends from.
The "place" where Lucas Beauchamp lives was originally part of the McCaslin plantation, one of Yoknapatawpha's original slave plantations built on the rich bottom land north of Jefferson (3). It is a large property: its two thousand acres include a drive from the main road "through the park" to the big house that is "almost a mile" long (7). Now it is owned by Carothers Edmunds, though blacks continue to work its cotton fields as tenant farmers and to live in cabins that the narrative refers to as the "servant and tenant quarters" (8).
Mrs. Downs, the "old white woman" who makes her living telling fortunes, curing hexes and finding lost things for an African American clientele, lives in "a small filthy shoebox of a house that smells like a foxden in a settlement of Negro houses" (69).
Descended from one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, Eunice Habersham lives in a "columned colonial house on the edge of town which had not been painted since her father died and had neither water nor electricity in it" (74). Unlike the newer houses in town, set close to the street on narrow lots, hers is typical of "the old big decaying wooden houses of Jefferson's long-ago foundation," set back in a large lawn of "old trees and rootbound scented and flowering shrubs" (117).
Sheriff Hoke Hampton is "a countryman" who owns the house and farm in the county where he was born, but during his terms in office he lives in town in a rented house (105). Judging by the details the narrative provides, it is a modest residence. The dining room is "linoleum-floored," and its furniture "rented Grand Rapids mission"; cooking is done on a woodstove in the kitchen (106).
The novel refers to both the "Hollow" and "Freedmantown" as the place or places where the Negro population of Jefferson lives (38). Variants of both these names occur in other Yoknapatawpha fictions, usually as referring to the same area between the Square and the railroad tracks. The black residents of this district work in town, either as domestics in white residences or as menial laborers in white businesses.
On Friday evening Chick tells his parents he is "going to the picture show" (31) as a pretext for going "to town" (32) to see how his community is reacting to the news of Vinson Gowrie's murder. He never gets inside the theater, but as he sits on a bench by the courthouse looking across the street at "the lighted marquee in front of the picture show," he imagines the audience leaving the theater at the end of the movie: "the first of the crowd dribbled then flowed beneath the marquee blinking into the light . . .
Mr. Lilley is "a countryman" who moved into town "a year ago" (46). In the county his "nearest neighbor" was two miles away; in town he chooses to live in "a small neat shoebox of a house built last year between two other houses already close enough to hear one anothers' toilets flush" (46).
In Intruder in the Dust Mr. Lilley is "a countryman" who moved into Jefferson "a year ago" (46). The place he lives gives Faulkner another chance to criticize houses that are built too close together. In the county his "nearest neighbor" was two miles away; in town he chooses to live in "a small neat shoebox of a house built last year between two other houses already close enough to hear one anothers' toilets flush" (46).
The front of the Jefferson undertaker's funeral parlor, with its "plate glass window" (179), is on the Square. The back of it, where Jake Montgomery's corpse is delivered to the "loading ramp," is at the end of "an alley beyond the jail" (177).
