The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In Go Down, Moses Gavin Stevens refers to the store that Samuel Worsham Beauchamp is caught breaking into as "Rouncewell's" (259). It is located in Jefferson (258), but exactly where is not specified. And while in several of the fictions the Rouncewells run a boarding house in Jefferson, and in The Town Mrs. Rouncewell is the town's florist, none of that helps us figure out what is sold in the store here. Given Beauchamp's break-in, it's not likely to be flowers. (See the entry for Rouncewell Flower Shop.)

Because we treat Belle Worsham (in Go Down, Moses) and Eunice Habersham (in Intruder in the Dust) as the same Character, we treat the houses they each live in as the same Location. In both the short story and novel versions of Moses, the dilapidated Worsham house sits on the edge of town. It has a "paintless door," and "the entire house was still lighted by oil lamps and there was no running water in it" (263, 360-61). Belle Worsham, the current proprietor, inherited the house from her father, Samuel Worsham, whose father built it before the Civil War.

The Negro servants who work for Belle Worsham in Go Down, Moses are Mr. and Mrs. Hamp Worsham. The Negro servants who work for Eunice Habersham in Intruder in the Dust are not given names. But in these three texts (including the short story version of "Go Down, Moses"), the husband is the brother of Mollie (or Molly) Beauchamp and like her descended from slaves who belonged to the ancestors of the white woman who now employs them to cook for her and to help raise chickens on the remains of what had been a kind of plantation.

The metal sign at this location marks the boundary between the county of Yoknapatawpha and the town of Jefferson. Though in Go Down, Moses it is seen from the back, on the "reverse" it reads "Jefferson, Corporate Limit" (266, 364). At this point, the pavement vanishes, and the street slants away into another hill, becoming gravel. It is the spot at which the story and the novel end.