Sartoris Plantation (Location Key)

First appearing in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, as the antebellum plantation "that John Sartoris built and rebuilt" (8), the Sartoris place four miles north of Jefferson is one of the most frequently visited locations in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. How it survived the challenges of the Civil War - including Yankee soldiers and emancipationist ideas - is dramatized in The Unvanquished stories. In Flags it has survived almost intact into the 20th century, its fields now being worked by tenant farmers rather than slaves, though by the end of the novel its future as a material representation of the Old South and the plantation aristocracy is unclear. In later fictions it is referred to more often than described; suggestively, in its chronologically last appearances (the final two volumes of the Snopes trilogy) it is a place to hunt quail. (Fourteen separate sites on the Sartoris plantation have their own entries in this index.)