The brothel with black prostitutes to which Clarence takes Fonzo and Virgil is "a house with red shades in the lighted windows" on a "narrow, dark street" (198). The "street of negro stores and theatres" that the men cross to get there is certainly Beale Street, which by the late 1920s was famous for its black-owned businesses and the blues of W. C. Handy. Clarence takes them to this place as an economy measure. Like so much else in Faulkner's South, the business of prostitution was shaped by the Jim Crow laws.
The original Gayoso House was built on Memphis' Main Street in 1842 as the city's first luxury hotel. Big, elegant and visible from the River, it was a statement about the city's prosperity. When that building burned down in 1899, an even grander hotel was built on the same spot. By the 1920s there were a number of other grand hotels in the downtown area. The second one that Fonzo and Virgil look into could have been the Claridge or the Chisca or the Hotel King Cotton.
Built on the site of the earlier Calhoun Street Station, Central Station in Memphis had 10 tracks when it opened in 1914. It would still have been a busy place when Fonzo and Virgil arrive there in Chapter 21, and even late at night Horace can buy a cup of coffee there while waiting for a train, though he "wished immediately that he had not," as it "lay like a hot ball" in his stomach throughout the three hours it took to get back to his house in Jefferson (221).
From the outside "Miss Reba's," the brothel where Popeye takes Temple, is one of a number of "dingy three-storey houses" on "a narrow dingy street of frame houses and junk yards" (142, 191). One end of the street lies close to the Mississippi River (it starts at "the foot of the bluff below Main Street," 142); at the other end is one of the city's trolley lines. Despite its nondescript appearance the brothel, at least according to Reba, is a very well known establishment, with a clientele that includes "bankers, lawyers, doctors - all of them" (143).
Like all the mourners, the narrative in Sanctuary stops following the hearse carrying Red's body before it reaches the cemetery. It's not necessary to suppose that Faulkner identified that destination with any the actual cemeteries in and around Memphis. But the narrative does say that the funeral procession moves along "the main artery that led back out of town" (249). If that road is Lamar Avenue, then the cemetery could be Forest Hill. Opened first in 1888, Forest Hill is best known as the place where Elvis Presley was temporarily buried after his death in 1977.
Sanctuary describes Red's funeral procession "moving slowly through the restricted district where faces peered from beneath lowered shades, toward the main artery that led back out of town" (249). The narrator seems to assume readers will understand this designation, and why the people in the neighborhood seem both interested and anxious about the funeral. We assume this district was the all-white, middle class Normal Station neighborhood in the area of the University of Memphis.
In Sanctuary the Grotto where Popeye takes Temple Drake to confront Red and which also serves as the site of Red's chaotic funeral service is Faulkner's representation of an underworld speakeasy and nightclub, where women in red dresses and gum-chewing men meet to drink illegal liquor, dance to jazz music and shoot dice at the crap table. It is somewhere beyond "the outskirts of the city" and the developing "broad, dark subdivisions" (232).
The brothel with black prostitutes to which Clarence Snopes takes Fonzo and Virgil in Sanctuary is "a house with red shades in the lighted windows" on a "narrow, dark street" (198). The "street of negro stores and theatres" that the men cross to get there is certainly Beale Street, which by the late 1920s was famous for its black-owned businesses and the blues of W. C. Handy. Clarence takes them to this place as an economy measure. Like so much else in Faulkner's South, the business of prostitution was shaped by the Jim Crow laws.
This is one of the other Memphis brothels mentioned in Sanctuary, and one of the two that Virgil Snopes and Fonzo Winbush visit - while living at Miss Reba's brothel under the assumption that it's a boarding house. The text does not provide any clear indication where this brothel is located, but according to a 1938 report on "Prostitution Conditions in Memphis," the city "tolerated" a "red light district located in the lower end of the city, a deteriorated section not far from the railroad and mainly inhabited by colored people," "chiefly along S.
This is one of the real locations that Faulkner uses for the purposes of a fiction, in this case Sanctuary. The original Gayoso House was built on Memphis' Main Street in 1842 as the city's first luxury hotel. Big, elegant and visible from the River, it was a statement about the city's prosperity. When that building burned down in 1899, an even grander hotel was built on the same spot. By the 1920s there were a number of other grand hotels in the downtown area. The second one that Fonzo and Virgil look into could have been the Claridge or the Chisca or the Hotel King Cotton.
