Major De Spain's Office in Jefferson (Location Key)

Neither "Lion" nor Go Down, Moses says what Major de Spain does for a living. In some texts he is clearly a planter, running a plantation, but in these texts he has an office in town. When Quentin visits him there in the short story, he mentions the "expensive, unobtrusive clothes" which De Spain wears at work and the "secretary" who works in a separate room (198). In the novel, where it's Ike McCaslin who visits De Spain, this office is described in more detail. It is a "big, airy, book-lined second-storey room with windows at one end opening upon the shabby hinder purlieus of stores and at the other a door giving onto the railed balcony above the Square" (301). Its furnishings include "a wicker-covered demijohn of whiskey" and a "bamboo-and-paper punkah [fan]" kept swinging back and forth over the Major's desk by "old Ash," the Negro servant who sits "in a tilted chair beside the entrance pulling the cord" (301).