Mobile, Alabama, is the largest city on the Gulf of Mexico between New Orleans and St. Petersburg. Popeye spent time there after leaving the town in Florida (probably Pensacola) where he grew up.
Lee Goodwin tells Horace that in the past he had been a cavalry sergeant "on the Border" (109). There's no reason to doubt that the border in this case is between the U.S. and Mexico. In response to the Mexican Revolution, the Army fortified a number of positions along the border, and beginning in 1914 there was open military conflict between the two sides. Battles and skirmishes were fought at points along the entire border, so our icon may be hundreds of miles east or west from where Faulkner imagined Goodwin served.
U.S. forces were stationed in the Philippines from the end of 19th century until after the Second World War. Lee Goodwin served in a cavalry outfit there, probably not many years before the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917. He was returned to the States and imprisoned after killing another soldier in a fight over a Filipino woman.
Ruby moves to New York during the period Lee is serving in France. She works at a munitions plant there, and is at the boat to meet him when he returns to the States.
Popeye asks his jailors "the name of this dump," the small Alabama town where he is convicted of and executed for a murder he did not commit. The narrative says "They told him," but for some reason it withholds the name from us (310). The town is presumably a county seat; it is large enough to have a courthouse and a District Attorney, and to hang a convicted murderer. Its location on the map is arbitrary.
"Paris" first appears in the novel in a comparison which establishes the third-person narrator as a cosmopolitan: Ruby and Lee's child looks like "the children which beggars on Paris streets carry" (116). The French city is also the scene of the novel's last event, which describes Temple Drake with her father on a bench "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris (316).
In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin tells Horace that in the past he had been a cavalry sergeant "on the Border" (109). The border is undoubtedly the one between the U.S. and Mexico. In response to the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the 20th century, the U.S. Army fortified a number of positions along that boundary line, and beginning in 1914 there was open military conflict between forces on the two sides of it.
The Philippines became a U.S. territory after the Spanish-American War and remained one until after World War II. In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin is stationed there around 1917 as a member of a U.S. cavalry outfit. While there he kills another soldier in a fight over a Filipino woman.
Virgil and Fonzo are on the train between Holly Springs and Memphis when they are introduced into the narrative. Horace also travels by train to Memphis in the novel, but that trip is not narrated.
