The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

At least according to Absalom, Absalom!, Jefferson already has "a blacksmith and livery stable" in 1833 (24). In a number of fictions the livery stable provides the town with horse-drawn taxi and freight delivery services, and for occasions like funerals or courtships one can rent carriages there.

Jefferson's railroad station is the main portal through which the county is connected to the larger world, and it appears as a location in 22 different texts. Go Down, Moses notes that it lies at the bottom of a "long hill" that runs "up from the station" to the Square (363).

"The house was a cabin," writes the narrator as Bayard approaches this location (360). Throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions the distinction between 'houses' and 'cabins' is often a racial one, as it apparently is in this case - i.e. 'cabins' are where Negroes live. In this case the occupants are a husband, a wife and three children, none of whom are named. It is further from Jefferson than the MacCallum place, on the road but in a very isolated part of the country.

Over the course of Faulkner's career he imaginatively revisits Frenchman's Bend and the small farms around the hamlet many times. It is dark when he visits the first one of those farms, the Turpin place where Byron Snopes spends his last minutes in Yoknapatawpha with Minnie Sue in Flags in the Dust, but Faulkner already has a clear image such a place.