Division (Location Key)

Division - the fictional town where Hawkshaw's fiancee and her family live in "Hair," and perhaps where he himself was born - is a small town on "the State line between Mississippi and Alabama" (137). It consists of "a store and four or five houses and a sawmill" (137). One of the best houses is town belongs to his fiancee's family, the Starneses - though it is heavily mortaged. In the nearby county seat is the bank that holds the mortgage. On our map, this one icon represents the town and the bank as well as that house, the store, and the graveyard where the Starneses are all buried during the course of the story. When the narrator pays a visit to the empty house, he describes it in some detail: "clean inside as a hospital"; "a melodeon in the corner, and a lamp and a Bible on the table"; and above the mantel, the framed wedding license that was never used (146). (Although the story never discusses the name of the town, other Faulkner texts make it likely that it derives from the way railroad companies 'divided' their tracks into long segments, each maintained and managed by a crew stationed at 'division points' between the segments.)