Modern Yoknapatawpha Plantations (Location Key)

As part of its larger history of Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun describes the system of agriculture on the county's large plantations on the eve of World War II: the rows of "two-room shotgun shacks" where "the Negro tenant- or share- or furnish-hand" lived with his family are still there, standing "across the plantation road" from "the plantation mule-lots" and near to the fields in which sharecroppers and mules previously worked the soil together (193). But now the Negroes are gone to "ghettos" in the North and elsewhere, and "the planter" who owns the property or "the planter's not-yet drafted son" works the land on a tractor (193). A shotgun shack is a small cabin with its two rooms laid out in a straight line, front to back. The passage does not describe the house in which the planter lives.