Division - the fictional town where Hawkshaw's fiancee and her family live, and perhaps where he himself was born - is a small town on "the State line between Mississippi and Alabama" (137). It consists of "a store and four or five houses and a sawmill" (137). One of the best houses is town belongs to his fiancee's family, the Starneses - though it is heavily mortaged. In the nearby county seat is the bank that holds the mortgage.
The narrator first sees Hawkshaw working in a barber shop in "Porterfield." There is a real Porterfield in Tennessee, but it's 220 miles away from Oxford, Mississippi, and so cannot be the town in the story, which is "sixty miles away" from Jefferson (137). Since the narrator is in Porterfield on his travels as a salesman whose territory is "North Mississippi and Alabama" (137), we've located it in northwestern Alabama.
The narrator says that until his health "broke down" he was "a bookkeeper in Gordonville" (144). There is a real Gordonville in Alabama, but it's too far away from Memphis to make it likely that the narrator, after his health did break down, would be returning there from the hospital "on a Memphis train" (144). We've located this fictional Gordonville, then, in Tennessee, east of Memphis.
A junction point is a place where several railroad lines meet or cross. The "junction-point" mentioned in this story (143) is presumably the same one that, on his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner calls "Memphis Junction" and locates north of the county. When Hawkshaw takes the train out of Jefferson, he buys a ticket to this point, from which, as Mitch Ewing notes, he could take other trains "to either Memphis or Birmingham or New Orleans" (143).
Although no goes there in the story, New Orleans is mentioned as one of the places that Hawkshaw could have traveled to by train from the "junction-point" (143).
Gavin Stevens is one of several upper class Yoknapatawpha men who go north to attend college at Harvard, the Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
