Jefferson Square Monument in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

The Confederate monument that stands in front of the courthouse in the Square at the center of Jefferson appears in 7 fictions, but Requiem is the only one that goes into its history, when it describes the scene on "Confederate Decoration Day" in 1900 when Colonel Sartoris' sister, Virginia DuPre, officially unveils it in front of a large (but presumably all white) crowd that includes an aged group of Confederate veterans who celebrate the moment with a last 'rebel yell' (188). According to the novel, the statue of a generic Southern soldier on a tall pedestal was "instigated" and paid for by the "U.D.C." - the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a real Southern organization (188). Requiem is also the only fiction to mention that two other monuments stand next to this one: "a French point-seventy-five field piece squatting on one flank of the base of the Confederate monument" that is obviously a memorial to the soldiers who fought (as American rather than Confederate soldiers) during World War I (190); and (presumably on the statue's other "flank") a memorial to the combatants of World War II that very explicitly marks a re-united, and diverse but still racially vexed United States: an anti-tank gun "captured from a regiment of Germans in an African desert by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms, whose mothers and fathers at the time were in a California detention camp for enemy aliens" (194).