Jefferson Restaurant (Location Key)

There are at least two restaurants for white people in Jefferson. The Side-Street Restaurant that gives Flem Snopes a foothold in the town has its own entry. The entry brings together the various restaurants that are located on the Square at the center of town. If there is just one of these, which is our assumption, it begins as "Rogers," then appears as "The Cafe," the "All-Nite Cafe," the "Allnite Inn" and the "Dixie Cafe." The most fully described of these is the one owned by Deacon Rogers in Flags in the Dust. It is more than just a restaurant: its "cluttered but clean front section" sells groceries (119), the restaurant tables and kitchen are in the back, and beyond them, behind a door, is the small back room where young Bayard Sartoris drinks toddies made from the moonshine whisky Rafe MacCallum provides, mixed with sugar and lemons supplied by Deacon himself - all in defiance of the MIssissippi prohibition against alcohol. Rogers is mentioned again in Faulkner's next novel, The Sound and the Fury, but not seen, because Jason rejects his boss' suggestion that he get himself "a lunch at Rogers'" (216). In five later fictions there are restaurants on the Square under four different names. It is of course possible that Faulkner imagines there is more than one restaurant on the Square, but since two or more Square restaurants never appear in the same text, we use Jefferson Restaurant to refer to "the Cafe" ("Uncle Willy"), the "All-Night Cafe" (Intruder in the Dust), the "Allnite Inn" ("Knight's Gambit") and the "Dixie Cafe" (The Town and The Mansion). These texts don't say enough about these places to distinguish them from each other, with the possible exception of the "All-Night Cafe," which Intruder calls a "cafe which stayed open all night" (206), and that some townspeople apparently think of it as an "allnight jukejoint coffee stall" (207). Typically, however, a "jukejoint" has a black clientele (see the Blue Goose Cafe in The Town), and the cafe in Intruder serves whites - which is one reason we'd rather not try to parse the difference between the "All-Night Cafe" and the "Allnite Inn," and so on.