"The Shack'll be open," says one of the town boys with whom Gowan has been drinking in Sanctuary, adding that it's "at the depot" (33). The place is described as "a confectionary-lunchroom," but it is open late at night too, and the one man inside it (wearing "a soiled apron") is willing to bring the young men the fixings - sugar, water and lemon - so they can make and drink what Gowan calls "whiskey sours" (33). This is in Oxford, where Faulkner lives as he is writing the scene, but if he has a real Oxford eatery in mind we haven't been able to identify it.
The "bridge across the railroad cutting" serves to connect the town of Oxford to the campus of the University of Mississippi (Sanctuary, 30). Historically, this setting is the 'Hilgard Cut,' the track and bridge that were designed by an engineer named Eugene Hilgard just before the Civil War to allow trains to run through Oxford and students to cross into town.
The University of Mississippi gymnasium (built in 1930) was also the venue for dances that were held on weekends - like the ones described in Chapter 4 in Sanctuary.
Luke, the man from whom Gowan and the three Oxford town boys buy whiskey in Sanctuary, lives half a mile outside Oxford, up a slope alongside the road to Taylor. Since his place is located so close to a main road, he may be a farmer as well as a moonshiner, but it's dark when they reach Luke's and the narrative does not let us see the place to know for sure.
This icon represents the male "students in the University" who date Temple on the weekends. The narrative describes them almost entirely in terms of their clothes - "knickers and bright pull-overs," or at dances the formally clad "black collegiate arms" and pairs of "black sleeves" (29).
Three "town boys" appear as individuals in Chapter 4. This icon refers to the aggregate group of young men who do not go to the University but do have access to cars which make them desirable dates for Temple on "week nights," between the dances and other weekend social activities on the campus (29). Excluded at those times, these "boys" can only watch Temple from a (socio-economic) distance. For their part, the "men" who are "students in the University" look down upon the boys, with their "pomaded heads" and "upturned collars" (29).
Jenny tells Horace that the last "young man" who tried courting Narcissa was "that Jones boy; Herschell" (24). From that it sounds as if Herschell belonged to a family the Benbows and Sartorises would have known socially, but beyond that we know nothing about him.
The narrator tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135).
In telling the men at the Old Frenchman place about his troubles with Little Belle's behavior, Horace mentions a young man whom she apparently met on the train coming "home from school" four days before the novel begins (14). She defends her relationship with him by telling Horace that "he goes to Tulane" (14). Though Horace's objectivity on the subject of Little Belle is not to be trusted, this particular unnamed young man seems to be one of several or perhaps many whom she has brought home; Horace sums them up as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13).
The Grotto where Popeye takes Temple to confront Red and which also serves as the site of Red's chaotic funeral service is Faulkner's representation of an underworld speakeasy and nightclub, where women in red dresses and gum-chewing men meet to drink illegal liquor, dance to jazz music and shoot dice at the crap table. It is somewhere beyond "the outskirts of the city" and the developing "broad, dark subdivisions" (232), but it could be in any direction from Miss Reba's.
