Built at the start of the 20th century, the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, was among the earliest federal prisons. In Sanctuary it is where Lee Goodwin does time for killing another soldier in the Philippines, and where Ruby gets a job as a waitress in a Childs (the real name of a national chain of restaurants) to be close to him. In The Town V.K. Ratliff speculates that Leavenworth is where Montgomery Ward Snopes could have ended up after his misbehavior in France during World War I.
Florida suddenly becomes an important part of the Yoknapatawpha story in the last chapter of Sanctuary, when the city of Pensacola turns out to be where Popeye grew up: what readers learn there about his childhood - especially the disease he inherited genetically, the 'past' that was already there when he was born - puts his character in a new perspective.
Jackson, named for President Andrew Jackson, is the capitol of Mississippi. Faulkner re-tells a good bit of its history from 1821 to the 'present' (i.e. 1950) in the 10-page prose introductory to Act II of Requiem for a Nun. His narrative relies on factual accounts, but he relates the story with a good deal of facetiousness that is his own, as when he calls the capitol building, a source of pride to many Mississippians, "this gilded pustule" (79).
In Sanctuary Popeye stops at a gas station in "Dumfries" on the trip with Temple from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis. The town's "skyline" boasts "roofs and a spire or two" (139), and it is big or prosperous enough to be entered via a paved road, but there is no real town with that name in either Mississippi or Tennessee.
Horace's train trip from Jefferson to Oxford and back again takes him from the county seat of Yoknapatawpha to the county seat of Lafayette, the real place on which Yoknapatawpha is based. This must have been an interesting trip for Faulkner's imagination to take. In any case the route Horace takes is practically impossible to follow. On the way to Oxford he gets off the train twice, once at dawn to eat breakfast and so to change trains (though not necessarily directions), and then "again" at a station filled with college students (168).
In Sanctuary Horace's train trip from Jefferson to Oxford and back again takes him from the county seat of Yoknapatawpha to the county seat of Lafayette, the real place on which Yoknapatawpha is based. This must have been an interesting trip for Faulkner's imagination to take. In any case the route Horace takes is practically impossible to follow. On the way to Oxford he gets off the train twice, once at dawn to eat breakfast and so to change trains (though not necessarily directions), and then "again" at a station filled with college students (168).
Horace passes through Jefferson's train station several times, on trips to Oxford or from Memphis. Its waiting room is small enough to be lit at night "by a single weak bulb" (167). When the narrative says it is "three quarters of a mile away" from the Benbow house, it gives us one of the town's dimensions (167).
After Narcissa refuses to allow Ruby to stay in the Benbow home, and the church ladies make the hotel evict her, Horace finally finds another temporary sleeping place for her in "the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to manufacture spells for negroes" (200). The only clue to its location is that it sits in off a lane in an "unbroken jungle" on "the edge of town." The woman does not sell whiskey, though police once raided her searching for it, but there is an obvious resemblance between this grim setting and the Old Frenchman place in the county.
Like the mobs and the funeral parlors, another echo between Sanctuary and Intruder in the Dust is this curious location. At least, we assume it's essentially a location, not two. In the earlier novel, after Ruby Lamar is driven from the Benbow house by Narcissa and the hotel by the church ladies, Horace finds a place for her to stay at "the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to manufacture spells for negroes" (200). In the later novel, Mrs.
The undertaker's establishment to which Tommy's corpse is taken is apparently also the county morgue. The building is public enough for "boys and youths" to look in the windows at the body, while "the younger men of the town" walk inside for a closer look (112).
