Parsham (Location Key)

To display the events in Chapters 8-13 of The Reivers we created 14 specific Parsham Locations; these have their own entries in this index. Parsham itself - or "Possum," as Ned calls it -- is an imaginary hamlet "where the railroad comes up from Jefferson and crosses the Memphis one where you changes [railroad] cars" (116). In Faulkner's earlier fictions, the town where travelers on the northbound train from Yoknapatawpha change for the westbound train to Memphis is usually called "Memphis Junction," though in Sanctuary Faulkner calls it Holly Springs, the real Mississippi town where the northbound tracks from Oxford crossed the westbound tracks to Memphis. Parsham, though, is explicitly located in "Tennessee" (215), and it seems more likely that if Faulkner based it on a real place, that place is Grand Junction, Tennessee, where the annual National Championship for bird dogs was held at the time of the story. Lucius describes Parsham as a "community composed of one winter-resort hotel and two stores and a cattle shute and a depot at a railroad intersection and the churches and schools and scattered farmhouses of a remote countryside" (189).