Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 19:10
During the Great Migration, Chicago was a major destination for blacks leaving the rural South. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp heads to Chicago after escaping from the county jail in Jefferson, Mississippi.
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 18:54
Located close to the Courthouse Square in Jefferson, the two-story jail shows up in many of Faulkner's works. In "Go Down, Moses," Samuel Worsham Beauchamp spends a year "in and out" of this jail (258) and then eventually escapes from it.
Submitted by kristi.humphrey... on Fri, 2015-01-30 18:14
Bayard Sartoris is the adolescent narrator of "Skirmish," though he is telling the story some years later. Although he is the narrator, it is not clear how well he understands either the sexual concerns of the white ladies in the story, or the racial anxieties of the white men. Bayard is a frequent character in other Faulkner texts, including the five other stories he narrates, which were revised to form the novel The Unvanquished. As an old man, he is a major character in Flags in the Dust, and appears or is mentioned in many other stories.
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 16:35
This is a plantation seventeen miles northeast of Jefferson, Mississippi. It includes a mansion, a number of tenant farmer cabins, and a commissary. Currently owned by Carothers Edmonds, it was originally founded by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Roth Edmonds' grandfather Cass Edmonds gained ownership of the plantation when Isaac McCaslin repudiated his inheritance.
Submitted by kristi.humphrey... on Fri, 2015-01-30 16:28
Colonel Sartoris' first wife and Old Bayard's mother apparently died during Bayard's childbirth (1849). She is never given a first name, but she is related to the Hawk family from Alabama; in "Skirmish at Sartoris," she is mentioned only when Drusilla Hawk says to Aunt Louisa, "I am just another mouth to feed, just a cousin of John's wife" (68).
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 16:21
The opening scene of "Go Down, Moses" takes place in a cell in the Illinois state penitentiary in Joliet. The cell is is described as a "steel crucible," with a "steel cot," a "steel stool," and a "steel door" (256, 257). An armed guard stands outside of it. Later in the story, Gavin Stevens calls the warden of this penitentiary. While there is a famous prison in Joliet, Faulkner probably was thinking of the nearby Stateville Penitentiary, which was the site of executions by electric chair from 1928 onward.
Submitted by sek4q@virginia.edu on Fri, 2015-01-30 15:57
Chicago, the largest city in Illinois, is a Location in 9 texts, and has its own entry in this index. The only other Illinois locations in the fictions are, probably coincidentally, both prisons. The first is Rock Island Prison, where Rosa's aunt's husband is held in Absalom! This was a real Union prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. It was opened in 1863 in Rock Island, Illinois, and became one of the Union Army's largest prisons; by the end of the war, over 12,000 Confederate soldiers had been held there.
When describing "all the grieving [people] about the earth" who have lost loved ones in the war, the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" establishes the difference between "the rich" and "the poor" on this basis: the rich live in big houses "with ten nigger servants" and the poor live on small farms by their own sweat (103). The introduction of race into this representation of people "about the earth" is a reminder of how the young boy telling this story, at least, segregates humanity along the color line created by Jim Crow.
