Northeast Road|Jefferson to Beat Four (Location Key)

The road that goes northeast from Jefferson is referred to as a "main road" in Flags in the Dust (259), a "high road" in "Gold Is Not Always" (228), and "the northeast road" by Chick Mallison in "Tomorrow." It leads to the MacCallum place, the McCaslin place, "Beat Four" (and a dozen specific Locations in Intruder in the Dust); it takes Jason Compson as far as he gets from his house in The Sound and the Fury - which isn't far. According to our calculations, it's where Bayard Sartoris (in Flags in the Dust) has his first car accident. As he is being taken toward town, the wagon goes down "a final hill, and the road emerged from the shade and crossed the flat treeless valley" (218). Chick Mallison is being driven on the road in the other direction in "Tomorrow," where he describes the journey this way: "We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt corn and cotton which somehow endured, as the people they clothed and fed somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time" (94-95). Like the other country roads in Yoknapatawpha, it is still unpaved in the middle of the 20th century.