Dumfries (Location Key)

In Sanctuary Popeye stops at a gas station in "Dumfries" on the trip with Temple from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis. The town's "skyline" boasts "roofs and a spire or two" (139), and it is big or prosperous enough to be entered via a paved road, but there is no real town with that name in either Mississippi or Tennessee. The description of Popeye's trip there (north through "woods" that give way to "fields") puts it more or less where the actual Holly Springs is found, but that town appears in the novel under its real name as a stop on Horace's train trip from Jefferson to Memphis. Similar to the way the narrative describes Horace's journey, the presence of both Holly Springs and "Dumfries" may be part of an attempt to obfuscate Yoknapatawpha's location in northeastern Mississippi.