Judge Stevens'|Gavin Stevens' Office (Location Key)

Gavin Stevens, one of Faulkner's favorite characters, practices law and serves Yoknapatawpha as the County Attorney in the same law office his father used before him, though the only time it is Judge Stevens' office is in Faulkner's last book, The Reivers. There it is located "just down the gallery from Doctor Peabody's" office (14); as is standard with the offices around Jefferson's Courthouse Square, this "gallery" runs outside along the second floor of a commercial building (which according to The Mansion contains the hardware store), and is reached by an outside set of stairs. In 9 earlier fictions quite a few people climb those stairs to meet with Gavin. Go Down, Moses, for example, mentions the steady stream of "officials from the city hall, and justices of the peace and bailiffs" who visit on county business (263, 360). In that novel it is also where Mollie Beauchamp, the aged black grandmother of Samuel Worsham Beauchamp, seeks out Gavin's help in bringing her grandson home. Much of Flem's story in the Snopes trilogy is told when Gavin, his nephew Charles and V.K. Ratliff discuss it in this office, and it's where in the trilogy's middle volume Flem's wife Eula visits Gavin at night just before taking her own life. Outside its window, according to Go Down, Moses, is a mulberry tree which helps keep it cool. Its interior is described in Intruder in the Dust as cluttered with "dogeared faded [and] stacked untidy papers" (29).