The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Faulkner seems to have invented the town of Renfro, where Job finds a telephone, along with the pasture "five miles away" from Renfro, where the last act of Willy's life plays out ("Uncle Willy," 246). Whether he imagined it as located in Tennessee or Mississippi (or, less probably, Arkansas) cannot be determined.

The Memphis Municipal Airport began operating in the summer, 1929. It is where, in "Uncle Willy," Willy Christian's black servant Secretary learns to fly as part of Willy's plan to escape from the constraints of Yoknapatawpha. At the time of that story (around 1933) it is so new that the story's narrator has to ask "What? What is it?" when he sees a sign for "Airport" (240). It is also where, in The Mansion, Gavin Stevens meets Linda Snopes Kohl on her return from Europe.

"The Keeley" in Memphis, where Willy is treated for his addiction, was part of a real chain of for-profit rehabilitation centers specializing in therapy for alcoholics ("Uncle Willy," 238). The first Keeley Institute was founded in 1879 in Illinois by Dr. Leslie Keeley; in time there were over 200 branches in various places around the U.S. The last Keeley Institute closed in 1965. The Keeley Cure, as it was called, was most popular around the turn into the 20th century. The center outside Memphis opened in the 1890s.

"Uncle Willy" mentions but does not describe or locate "Reverend Schultz's house"; it could be anywhere in Jefferson (237). It also could be a parsonage, but that isn't made explicit.

After Willy Christian gets his sister to buy him a car in "Uncle Willy," 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.

Mrs. Merridew tries to cure Willy Christian's morphine addiction by taking him to her house for "lemonade," a "chicken dinner," a "nap in [her] hammock" and "some nice ice cream" ("Uncle Willy," 229).

The few details that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" provides about himself and his family include the fact that on Sunday mornings he and the other boys who admire Uncle Willy "wait in our yards" for him to pass by on his way to church (227).

Willy Christian was born and still lives in "a little old neat white house . . . on the edge of town" ("Uncle Willy," 225). It could have been built in the antebellum era, since that is when his father opened the drug store that Willy also inherited. The house is on "a little quiet side street where the other houses are all little new ones" (237). The neighborhood is a lower-middle-class one: his new neighbors are "country people who had moved to town within the last fifteen years, like mail carriers and little storekeepers" (237).