Oxford: The Coop (Location Key)

In 1930 women students at the University of Mississippi resided in two adjacent dormitories - Ricks and Ward - which were connected by a dining hall. Students called this complex "The Coop": according to A.B. Lewis, a student in the early twenties, "We called them collectively the 'coop,' and boys who frequented the 'coop' were called 'coop hounds.'" Faulkner uses the first of these nicknames for the dormitory where Temple Drake lives in Sanctuary. (In Flags in the Dust, Bayard Sartoris leads a group that serenades the women students in their dorm at the state university, and one of the young men playing tennis at Belle's was expelled from the school for hanging a red light "above the door of the girls' dormitory," 186)