The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Although Kentucky did not secede from the Union during the Civil War, it was a slave-holding state, and the Ohio River separating Kentucky from Ohio was often employed like the Mason-Dixon Line, as a way to distinguish 'the South' from 'the North.' Presumably that is the context for Jason's sarcastic and racist remark in The Sound and the Fury when he echoes what he assumes Northerners say about Negroes: "Get them ahead, what I say. Get them so far ahead you cant find one south of Louisville with a blood hound" (231). Louisville is a Kentucky city on the Ohio River.

Colorado was not admitted to the Union as a state until 1876, and was not even formally organized into 'territory' until 1861 - details that Light in August ignores when it says Nathaniel Burden wrote letters to his family "from Colorado" while he lived there in the early 1850s (243). "He did not say what he was doing" there - nor does the novel (243).

As the westernmost place on the continent with the hills that are full of gold, "California" has long been a symbolic destination for Americans. In the fictions Faulkner sometimes pairs it with "Texas" as a place for running away from one's past (The Town, 346), though when Temple Drake Stevens looks for that kind of escape on a California beach that is "far from Jefferson" (Requiem for a Nun, 61) her own son reminds her why she has to go back. For Willy Christian, who wants to escape Jefferson's present rather than his past, California is mythic.

In Light in August Calvin Burden's journey to California takes him around Cape Horn, the southernmost point in the Western Hemisphere. Before the Panama Canal was built at the beginning of the 20th century, ships had to sail 'around the Horn' to travel between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans.

Joe Christmas is in a brothel somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line when he is outraged by a (white) prostitute who has no objections to the possibility that he is "a negro" (Light in August, 225).