Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Thu, 2014-05-29 15:44
Joe Christmas and Joe Brown make enough money selling illegal whiskey in Jefferson to quit their jobs at the planing mill and buy a car. The narrative refers several times to the men who buy from them, but the closest it ever comes to individualizing these customers is when it says that the "young men and even boys" in town all know that they can purchase whiskey "from Brown almost on sight" (46).
Sutpen's "nearest neighbor" lives a mile away from his plantation; when after the war Sutpen gets too drunk to get home on his own from the store, Wash walks to this man's place and borrows a wagon to carry him in (540).
Sutpen's "nearest neighbor," from whom Wash has to borrow a wagon whenever Sutpen himself is too drunk to walk back to his plantation house from his store, lives a mile away (540). This suggests that this northwestern part of Yoknapatawpha is still sparsely populated after the Civil War.
In both "Wash" and Absalom!, the "old Negro" midwife who deliver's Milly's baby lives three miles from the fishing camp where the birth takes place (535, 230). In the novel she is unnamed, but in the short story her name is Dicey.
Sutpen's "nearest neighbor," from whom Wash has to borrow a wagon whenever Sutpen himself is too drunk to walk back to his plantation house from his store, lives a mile away from Sutpen's Hundred (Absalom, Absalom!, 540). That distance suggests that this northwestern part of Yoknapatawpha is still sparsely populated after the Civil War.
While all the land along the river is swampy, this is the place which the narrative refers to as "the swamp" (333). It is where "the Negro" takes refuge, and probably where he is bitten by a "cottonmouth moccasin" (338). It is small enough for the Indians to "form a circle" around it, and that is how they finally capture him (337).
