Negro Cabin where Joe Christmas Eats (Location Key)

The account of Joe's flight across the landscape of Yoknapatawpha in Light in August is alternately vivid and vague, making his route impossible to establish with any certainty. This cabin, for example, only exists in a memory Joe has sometime after he stopped there: "house or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which" until the "smell" of "negro" and "negro food" brings it back to him (334-35). In this memory it consists of people who flee "suddenly and in fear," a "table" and "food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands" (335). Locating it in the southwestern part of Yoknapatawpha is speculative, but consistent with the details the narrative does provide about Joe's wanderings. (Note how Joe's thoughts, if written out as an analogy equation, would look like this: house:white::cabin:black - i.e. white people live in 'houses,' black people live in 'cabins.' The encoded socio-racial-economic assumptions here are also frequently present in Faulkner's fictions.)