Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:26
Among the outbuildings on Pritchel's farm in "An Error in Chemistry" is a "stable" that contains a "feed room" - and, it turns out, "old Mr. Pritchel" too (133).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:25
In "An Error in Chemistry" Ellie Pritchel Flint is buried in the local "churchyard" (124), a burial ground adjacent to the church itself. We assume the Flints live in Frenchman's Bend, but the story is so vague about the "little cross-roads hamlet" (114) where it takes place that rather than extrapolate from that assumption and assume which of the two Bend cemeteries that appear in other texts she is in, we create this third cemetery, which like the rest of the story may be in the Bend.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:25
In "An Error in Chemistry" the woods on Pritchel's farm where Pritchel and Flint hunt squirrels "every Sunday morning" are near the Flints' house (127).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:22
This clay-pit is in "the middle of [Pritchel's] farm" in "An Error in Chemistry" (119). The clay is "malleable" and embedded in it are Native American artifacts that once attracted "a party of archaeologists from the State University," but it becomes an important element in the story when it attracts a group of business men looking to "manufacture some kind of road material out of the clay" (119).
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, Jefferson's black population lives in two different places. The domestic servants who are employed by the town's older families typically live behind their employers' houses (as was the case with Faulkner's own "mammy," Caroline Barr). Most of the rest of the black population lives in an area west of the Square. This area wears several different names in the Yoknapatawpha fictions: Freedman Town, Negro Hollow, Nigger Hollow.
"Sonny Barger's store," in the Negro district of Jefferson, seems to be as seedy a place as Willy's drugstore (234). The "Jamaica ginger" that the narrator purchases there for Willy was a widely-known way to evade prohibition laws (234): advertised and sold as a medicine, its contents were 80-90% ethanol.
After Willy gets his sister to buy him a car, he and Secretary learn to drive it "on the night trips they would make back into the hill country to buy corn whisky" (236). "Hill country" in the Yoknapatawpha fictions invariably means the area east of Jefferson, where the land was ill-suited to farming cotton. Like Mississippi in real life during Faulkner's lifetime, Yoknapatawpha was "dry" - i.e.
The narrator and some of his friends buy "sandwiches" and a "bottle of coffee" for Willy at "the café," which must be close to the drug store (230). We assume it is the 'Jefferson restaurant' on the Square that appears in other texts under four different names, including the "Dixie cafe" (in The Town and The Mansion.
Mrs. Merridew tries to cure Willy's morphine addiction by taking him to her house for "lemonade," a "chicken dinner," a "nap in [her] hammock" and "some nice ice cream" (229).
The town's "post office," where Willy's wife stops to taunt the men "who were waiting . . . for the afternoon mail," is located somewhere near the Square (238).
