The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"Now and then" Sam Fathers goes to the "Negro church" with the black workers who live on the narrator's father's farm (203). The location is not specified in the text so we have chosen to place it in the same position as the Negro church in Jefferson as it appears in The Sound and the Fury.

This icon represents the unspecified number of cabins for black tenant farmers on the narrator's father's property. Until he moves out to the big woods, Sam Fathers lives "among Negroes" in one of them, "a cabin among the other cabins" (203). That phrase suggests the layout of a slave plantation, where the slaves lived in the 'quarters' somewhere behind the big house where the white people who owned the plantation, and them, lived.

The narrator's father's "farm" situated four miles from Jefferson (203), and the few hints we get about its nature suggests that it is more like a plantation than a "farm": there are cabins for black tenant farmers on the land, as well as Sam Father's blacksmith shop. When the same location recurs in "The Bear," it is explicitly called a "plantation."

The "crossings" that intersect the ridge path are faint trails made by deer moving through the woods (282). They are good places for hunters to wait for game.

The beginning of the ridge is invisible from within the woods. The narrator discerns that they have reached the edge of the ridge when he notices that "the earth had risen slightly because the undergrowth had thinned a little and the ground which you could not see slanted, sloping away toward a dense brake of cane" (208). The narrator also comments that where the ridge begins there is "a clump of switchlike bushes against the trunk of a pin oak" (208). The path along the ridge is intersected at intervals by deer crossings.

The trail, along which the hunters take the wagon and horses, bends away through the woods from the hunting camp. It is flanked at one point by a paw-paw thicket.

Before they reach the big woods, the hunters travel past the "skeletoned cotton- and corn-fields . . . hard, gaunt, and motionless beneath the gray rain" and houses and barns (206). The fields are "skeletoned" at this time of year because they've been harvested. The houses and barns mark the the last point "where the hand of man had clawed for an instant, holding, the wall of the wilderness" that lies just beyond them (206).

The road into the big woods presumably branches off the northwest road, but the story isn't explicit about that. What it does describe very vividly is the place at which this road enters the woods, when the hunters cross a "line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall" (168). On one side of this door, the "skeleton cotton- and corn-fields," "houses, barns, fences" of Yoknapatawpha - on the other, the "wilderness," "tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable" (168).

The hunting and fishing camp owned by Major de Spain on the south bank of the large bend of the river is where the men from Jefferson and other parts of Yoknapatawpha go to hunt deer and the occasional bear in the surrounding woods. The camp is unpopulated apart from during the hunting season for a few days in the fall, until Sam Fathers settles there and builds a little house, after which Major de Spain and the narrator's father leave their hunting dogs and horses with him permanently.

Jobaker's "foul little shack" (204) is situated at the forks of a creek four or five miles from the narrator's father's farm and about the same distance from any other habitation. It is destroyed by fire.