The Negro church where Dilsey worships is located on the edge of the black neighborhood. From the road it appears set on "a painted backdrop": beside "a cut of red clay crowned with oaks . . . a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church" (292). Inside it is decorated for Easter "with sparse flowers from kitchen gardens and hedgerows, and with streamers of colored crepe paper" (292).
The section of Jefferson where the black population is concentrated has a number of different names in Faulkner's fiction. The third-person narrator of The Sound and the Fury's fourth section refers to it as "Nigger Hollow" (302). The neighborhood is not far from the Courthouse Square, but set considerably below the plateau on which the town itself is built. Dilsey and her family, with Benjy, pass through this section on their way to church: "A street turned at right angles, descending, and became a dirt road.
The Sheriff of Yoknapatawpha lives in "a frame house" with a "flower bordered walk to the porch" (301). To reach it, Jason drives across the Square, then turns into a "narrow" and "quiet" street (301). It is close enough to the African American section of town for him to hear the church bells ringing there as he tries to convince the Sheriff to go after his niece.
In Intruder in the Dust 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). In The Town the Sheriff's name is Hope Hampton, and his house is only mentioned, not described.
The road from Jefferson to Mottson is unpaved (Jason assumes that if it rains, the road will turn to "mud" in which his car can get stuck, 305). As Jason drives along it, he passes small churches "from time to time": "unpainted frame buildings with sheet iron steeples, surrounded by tethered teams and shabby motorcars" (306).
The "filling station" where Jason stops to have "his tires examined and the tank filled" (305) could be anywhere in Jefferson. We are locating it on the same site which is identified much more specifically in Sanctuary.
The train station in Mottson, where the railroad cars of the traveling show are on a siding, is on the line that runs through Jefferson. The station is deserted on an Easter Sunday morning. The "show cars" are "two gaudily painted pullmans" from which a few drying clothes hang out the windows (308).
The tracks that run through Jefferson go south to the seat of the county next to Yoknapatawpha, the town that Faulkner sometimes spells 'Mottston' and sometimes 'Mottstown.' The modern electric sign at the train station says "Mottson" in The Sound and the Fury when Jason Compson drives there on Easter morning, expecting to capture his niece and recover the money she took from his room before running away with a man from the carnival or circus that has traveled overnight by train to Mottson (311).
Faulkner usually refers to the town this novel calls "Mottson" as "Mottstown." It is not in Yoknapatawpha, but the next town to the south. Because it is also the next town on the itinerary of the show that was in Jefferson, Jason drives there hoping to catch up to his niece and the money she took. Looking down on it from the last hill on his drive, Jason sees "roofs, a spire or two above trees" (308). After a disastrous attempt to find Miss Quentin at the town's train yard, he drives downtown, where the drugstore is closed on Easter Sunday.
The first Negro church mentioned in the fictions has burned down before Flags in the Dust begins, which is why its pastor refers to it as the "late Fust Baptis' church" (286). It is where Simon Strothers worshipped, and as a "Deacon" had possession of the funds that the congregation was saving to build the Second Baptist church (286). In that novel readers meet that preacher and half a dozen members of his congregation, but hear nothing more about the church or where its building was located.
