Valley Road in "Knight's Gambit" (Location)

Display Label: 
Valley Road
Map Icon: 
Event
Authority : 
Faulkner map
X: 
1290
Y: 
535
Description: 

The road between Jefferson and the large estates on the rich land north of town - including the Backus-Harriss plantation six miles up it - is often traveled in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. Even in 1940, it is "still just a country road," graveled but not paved (163). The description of it in this text is particularly rich in resonance and detail: "And it (the road) was older than gravel too, running back into the old time of simple dirt red and curving among the hills, then straight and black where the rich land flattened, alluvial and fertile; niggard in width since the land was too rich, too fecund in corn and cotton, to allow room for men to pass one another almost, marked only by the thin iron of carriage- and wagon-rims and the open O's of horses and mules" (241). Almost all the travel on it in the story, however, is by automobile.

Role: 
Site of Event
Status: 
Continuous
Types: 
Country Road

digyok:node/location/19194