Negro Graveyard (Location Key)

Like every other part of the social landscape in Yoknapatawpha, cemeteries were rigorously segregated. The cemetery where Rider's wife Mannie is buried in "Pantaloon in Black" is a 'Negro' one, or perhaps what Flags in the Dust calls, in reference to a different graveyard, "the negro ground that lay beyond the cemetery proper" (396). The focus of the scene of Mannie's funeral is on her grave site, though the narrator notes that it "resembles any other" in the cemetery: "marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read" (238, 129). Bordering the graveyard is a "three-strand fence" that Rider steps over to cross the road and enter the woods (239, 130).