Ordinarily the lot across an alley from the jail is where some of the country people tether the wagons that bring them to town on market days. At the climax of Sanctuary this lot is where a "throng" of lynchers take Lee Goodwin to violate and then burn him to death (296).
Though set behind a fence and a yard, the jail is close enough to the street for the friends of the "negro murderer" who awaits execution in one of its cells to sing and talk with him through a window (114), and for Goodwin to worry about being shot through the narrow windows of his cell ("two orifices not much larger than sabre slashes," 115) from the hotel across the street. The white-washed walls of the jail's "general room" are "scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel" (126).
Located at the center of Yoknapatawpha, the county courthouse (with its apt "gothic entrance") and the wide grounds surrounding it (set with "locusts and water oaks") appear in many of Faulkner's fictions (281, 161). The square around the courthouse is the physical, economic and social center of Jefferson. It is first described in some detail in Sanctuary in Chapter 15, when Horace goes into town on a Saturday, the day when the country people typically come in to town too to shop.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2014-01-03 19:08
"Saulsbury, Tennessee" is a real town in Tennessee, about 70 miles east of Memphis and a few miles north of the border between Tennessee and Mississippi (507). On the road just south of Saulsbury is where the story ends, but it seems that for Lena, who has the novel's last words, it is only the next place on her journey - or as she puts it, "My, my. A body does get around" (507).
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2014-01-03 19:01
The furniture dealer tells Bryon that he can give him and Lena a ride, but he's going past Jackson, Tennessee, not to Memphis (495). Jackson is a real town in Tennessee.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2014-01-03 18:59
The furniture dealer lives in "the eastern part" of Mississippi (494); his home - in fact, his bed - is where he narrates the novel's last chapter and tells his wife about giving Lena, Byron, and the baby a ride into Tennessee.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2014-01-03 18:56
Saulsbury is a real town in Tennessee, about seventy miles east of Memphis and a few miles north of the border between Tennessee and Mississippi (507). Light in August ends in two places at once: the bed at the furniture dealer's house and, in the story he is telling his wife as they lie there happily, on the road just south of Saulsbury. For Lena Grove, to whom the dealer gives the last words of his story and who therefore has novel's last - but definitely not 'final' - words, this is only the next place on her journey. As she puts it: "My, my.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Fri, 2014-01-03 18:53
The furniture dealer who narrates most of the last chapter of Light in August lives in "the eastern part" of Mississippi (494); it is in his home - in fact, in his bed - that he tells his wife about his experience on the road to Tennessee with Byron Bunch and Lena Grove and her baby.
