Negro Hollow|Freedman Town in The Sound and the Fury (Location)

The section of Jefferson where the black population is concentrated has a number of different names in Faulkner's fiction. The third-person narrator of The Sound and the Fury's fourth section refers to it as "Nigger Hollow" (302). The neighborhood is not far from the Courthouse Square, but set considerably below the plateau on which the town itself is built. Dilsey and her family, with Benjy, pass through this section on their way to church: "A street turned at right angles, descending, and became a dirt road. On either hand the land dropped more sharply; a broad flat dotted with small cabins whose weathered roofs were on a level with the crown of the road" (291). On the "small grassless plots littered with broken things" grow "rank weeds" and "trees that partake of the foul disiccation which surrounded the houses" (290-91).