Compson Place: Dilsey's Cabin (Location Key)

Dilsey and her family live in what is almost certainly a former slave cabin behind the Compsons' big house. The ground in front of the cabin is "bare," and it is "shaded" by three mulberry trees (266). It is the scene of events in The Sound and the Fury; Benjy, who occasionally sleeps there and likes the way it smells, refers to it as "Dilsey's house" (33), and at other points as "T.P.'s house" and "Versh's house." It is mentioned but not used as a location in "That Evening Sun." In the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner wrote in 1946 the "one servant's cabin" where "Dilsey's family lives" is referred to as one of the last remaining parts of the Compson estate in the late 1920s, along with the big house, the "kitchen garden and the collapsing stables" (330). It is presumably torn down when the property in turned into a housing development, which the "Appendix" refers to as "row after row" of small houses and which in the Jim Crow South would be restricted to whites; this may explain why Dilsey has moved to Memphis, though all the "Appendix" says about her leaving is that when she moved "Dilsey refused to go further" from Yoknapatawpha than Memphis (343).