The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Courthouse Square in Jefferson, as the center of both the town and the county, appears in many of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying we see it first through Darl's eyes, entering town in the middle of the day: "We approach the crest, where the street runs, where cars go back and forth . . . The street runs on ahead, where the square opens and the monument stands before the courthouse" (231). Later we see it through Vardaman's eyes, as he walks through it that night with his sister: "the stores are dark because they have all gone home.

The drugstore is one of the shops on the Square around the courthouse. Vardaman comments on "the two big glasses of soda water, red and green" set as a display in its window: "Two men could not drink them. . . . Two cows could not" (250). Dewey Dell visits the drugstore twice: during the day to get abortion medicine and after dark to "get the rest of her treatment" from MacGowan while Vardaman sits outside waiting for her (247).

Doctor Peabody's office, where Cash's cast is removed and his broken leg reset, is located near the Square.

As the mule-drawn wagon carrying Addie's body reaches Jefferson, the narrative provides a good sense of what it is like to enter the town from that side. From the bottom of the "red sand" hill that rises to the plateau on which Jefferson stands, Darl can see "the massed telephone lines" and "the clock on the courthouse among the trees" that represent the town (229). Walking beside the wagon at this point, they see the first "negroes" who appear in the novel.

The last time the Bundrens stop before reaching Jefferson "aint over a mile" from town. For the last several miles on the road they have been seeing signs advertising the stores of Jefferson. At the "foot of a hill where the road flattens between close walls of trees" Dewey Dell insists they stop so she can change into her best clothes (227). While they are stopped a car passes them, the first automobile that is mentioned on their entire trip.

The railroad station in Jefferson is where the state agents take Darl and put him on the train to Jackson.

The Mississippi State Insane Asylum - referred to simply as "Jackson" in the novel - was located in the city of Jackson until 1935. At the end of Darl's last section in the novel he either is or is imagining himself there: "in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams" (254).

Located on a hill somewhere between Mottson and Jefferson, Gillespie's is where the Bundrens spend the last night of their journey to town. During the night they move Addie's coffin from under an apple tree across the yard from the house to the barn. This barn is visible from the back porch of the house, where Dewey Dell and Vardaman sleep. In an attempt to end the journey, Darl burns it down.

Located on the outskirts of Mottstown near a branch, this is where the Bundrens stop to get water to mix the cement for Cash's leg. While this happens, the man who lives in the house watches from the porch. This is also where Jewel catches back up with the family on foot after returning his horse to Snopes in Frenchman's Bend.

Faulkner usually refers to the town this novel calls "Mottson" as "Mottstown." It is not in Yoknapatawpha, but the next town to the south. It figures in a number of Faulkner's fictions, from The Sound and the Fury to The Town. In As I Lay Dying it is where the flood forces the Bundrens to go in order to get to Jefferson. They visit the hardware store and the drugstore, and in the street Anse has an argument with the marshal about the smell of Addie's dead body.