On the town Square is a "cafe which stayed open all night" (206). Some townspeople apparently think of it as an "allnight jukejoint coffee stall" (207). Typically a "juke joint" is a place on the margins of the law where blacks can drink, gamble and listen to music, owned and operated by blacks. But none of that seems to apply to this cafe, with a late night clientele that seems to consist almost exclusively of "long-haul" "truck drivers" and the town's night marshal (207, 206).
When Gavin tells his sister that because of the possible lynching Chick won't be going to school, he refers to it as the "white school" (126). Ordinarily he'd simply have said "school," but he had just mentioned to her that there "wont be a Negro school today" for Aleck Sander (125-26). This is one of the few places where the fictions explicitly acknowledge the reality of education in the segregated world of Yoknapatawpha: Chick and Aleck Sander have grown up together as friends, but cannot attend the same school.
The county courthouse sits in the middle of a tree-shaded square at the center of Jefferson, and throughout Faulkner's fictions represents the center of Yoknapatawpha as well. It also serves to locate the county in time: the narrative mentions how "the courthouse and everything else on or in the Square [was] burned to rubble by Federal occupation forces after a battle in 1864" (48-49). Some years later the town erected "the slender white pencil of the Confederate monument" in front of the reconstructed courthouse (48).
The shed behind the poolhall is "stacked with soft drink cases and littered with empty whiskey bottles" (209). The narrative provides a few more details about the barbershop, including the fact that many of the unmarried men who live in town take their "Saturday and Sunday baths" (42) in the "bath-cabinets" behind it (209). But on the whole the novel treats "the poolhall and the barbershop" as essentially interchangeable - and apparently contiguous - places: in them both the town's "young men and some not so young" hang out, "not only on Saturday afternoons but all the week too" (27).
The blacksmith's shop is across the street from the jail. At the beginning of the novel Chick is standing under the shed in front of it. The shop has been there for most of the town's history; the "heavy rosette-shaped" and "handwrought" hinges on the jail door were "hammered out over a hundred years ago" in it (53). On the day the novel begins it is "closed" (3), probably because it is Sunday morning; there is no indication that the shop is not still active during the rest of the week.
Although this entry aggregates the three blacksmith shops in Jefferson mentioned in the texts, each tells a different kind of story. In the order of Yoknapatawpha history, the "blacksmith's" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun comes first. It is one of the earliest buildings in the settlement that hasn't even been named 'Jefferson' yet; "a century and a quarter later" - that is, between 1920 and 1930 - it has been replaced by or transformed into "a garage" just as horses have been replaced by cars (167).
Gavin Stevens' law office is on the second floor of one of the commercial buildings around the Courthouse Square. As is standard in the buildings on the Square, the second story is reached by a set of "outside stairs" (28). Inside it is cluttered with "dogeared faded [and] stacked untidy papers" (29). Most of its furnishings have been around since Gavin's father practiced law there, and "the county's legal business" has passed through the office for "longer than [Chick] could remember" (29).
While most of Jefferson's black population live in the residential sections called The Hollow and Freedmantown (38), Paralee Sanders, the Negro who has been a servant in the Mallison and possibly the Stevens families for a long period of time, lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. This arrangement, of course, suggests the layout of a plantation, with its big house and slave quarters, though there is no suggestion in the novel that the Mallison property was ever a working plantation.
While most of Jefferson's black population live in the residential section called the Hollow and Freedmantown (38), Paralee, the Negro who has been a servant in the Mallison and possibly the Stevens families for a long period of time, lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. This arrangement is similar to the way, for example, Elnora lives behind the Sartoris mansion or Dilsey lives behind the Compson place.
