The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In The Sound and the Fury the metal gate that separates the Compson house from the street that runs past it and into town has been kept locked since Benjy was a child so that he cannot 'escape.' But he regularly goes down to the gate, first to wait for the young Caddy coming home from school (6), then, after she grows up and marries, to watch other school girls going past the house on their way home. This gate is accidentally left unlocked one day when Benjy is about seventeen years old, allowing him to get into the street where he tries to talk to a young girl named Burgess.

The Sound and the Fury does not make clear how close the Burgess family lives to the Compson property, but when Jason thinks about what happened to Benjy the time he got outside the gate and tried "to say" something to the Burgess girl as she walked past on her way home from school (53), he notes that "her own father [was] looking at" Benjy at the moment (263). If Mr. Burgess was in his own yard, then presumably they lived across the street - and the "fence picket" with which he knocks Benjy out would have been pulled from his own fence (263).

There are a great many cemeteries in Yoknapatawpha. The site that Dilsey and Luster both refer to as Benjy's "graveyard" is among the most unusual (55, 56). It is under "a clump of cedar trees near the fence" (314). Benjy visits it in both the first and fourth sections of the novel, and probably on most other days as well. In the novel's fourth section the narrator provides this description: Luster "came upon Ben squatting before a small mound of earth. At either end of it a small container of blue glass that once contained poison was fixed in the ground.

As was once typical in the homes of white southerners with Negro slaves or servants, the Compsons' kitchen is almost a separate structure: only one story high and built directly out from the back of the main house. From the slave-owners' or white employers' point of view, this design helped keep the heat and odor of cooking out of the 'big house,' and served as kind of fire protection for it. At the same time provided the black slaves or servants with a place indoors where they could meet away from white eyes and talk with each other.

What Benjy refers to as a "swing" in his section of The Sound and the Fury (46) is described by the omniscient narrator of the novel's last section as "a hammock made of barrel staves slatted into woven wires" (314). Presumably this one swing holds both Caddie and Charlie sometime around 1909 and Caddy's daughter Quentin and the man who wears a red tie in 1928.

During the years covered by the Benjy's and Quentin's memories in The Sound and the Fury, the barn at the back of the Compson place contains a number of horses and cows, with a pen next to it for the family's pigs. By the time Benjy passes it in 1928, the "stalls are all open" and the "roof is falling" apart (12), though the aged horse Queenie is still there someplace.

This is the tree that Benjy Compson refers to as "the flower tree" (3).

In The Sound and the Fury the back of the Compson property contains many of the features of the original plantation, such as the remains of an orchard that Benjy refers to as the "thick trees" (46) and the aristocratic lawn swing, and parts of a working farm, such as the barn and pig pen. The ground immediately behind the house is described by the narrator as "bare," "as though from the soles of bare feet in generations" (266).

In The Sound and the Fury for at least some of the time the Compson children are growing up, their Uncle Maury is living with them and having an affair with Mrs. Patterson, the married woman who lives next door. The first memory that appears in Benjy's section is of him and Caddie carrying a note from their uncle to her just before Christmas, 1903; they cross the frozen "branch" (or creek) and walk through "the brown, rattling flowers" in the Pattersons' garden that lies alongside their house.

When the Compson property was an antebellum plantation it contained a square mile of land. By the time the Compson children are born at the end of the nineteenth century, most of that land has been sold, but during their childhood there is still a pasture beside the house. It is either a "twenty acre pasture" (35) or "forty acres" in area (174) - The Sound and the Fury is inconsistent on this point. Quentin and Caddy do consistently call it "Benjy's pasture," because going into it is apparently one of his main sources of pleasure as a child (174).