Paralee's Cabin in Intruder in the Dust (Location)

While most of Jefferson's black population live in the residential sections called The Hollow and Freedmantown (38), Paralee Sanders, the Negro who has been a servant in the Mallison and possibly the Stevens families for a long period of time, lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. This arrangement, of course, suggests the layout of a plantation, with its big house and slave quarters, though there is no suggestion in the novel that the Mallison property was ever a working plantation. Chick Mallison "had spent a good part of his life" in that cabin in the back yard (11), eating meals there "together" with Paralee's son Aleck (12). It was in that cabin, too, that the narrative says he grew accustomed to the smell of Negroes as "a rich part of his heritage as a Southerner" (12).