The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the cabin in The Unvanquished that Grumby's Independents burn when they kill the man who lives there: "There was one Negro in the county that everybody knew that they had murdered and burned him up in his cabin" (93).

As part of its larger history of Yoknapatawpha, Requiem for a Nun describes the system of agriculture on the county's large plantations on the eve of World War II: the rows of "two-room shotgun shacks" where "the Negro tenant- or share- or furnish-hand" lived with his family are still there, standing "across the plantation road" from "the plantation mule-lots" and near to the fields in which sharecroppers and mules previously worked the soil together (193).

The church where the Sutpen family worships in Absalom, Absalom! is identified on Faulkner's 1936 map only as "Church (which Sutpen rode fast to)" ([314]). This novel does not mention the church's denominational affiliation, but if the Sutpens - the owners of the largest and wealthiest planation in Yoknapatawpha - attend it, it's almost certainly Episcopalian.

In Faulkner's fictions, a 'bottom' is the wetland along the sides of a stream or river; typically it is thickly overgrown and a good place to hide. This is the "bottom" between Mottstown and the Sartoris plantation where Ab Snopes hides the mules that Miss Rosa has stolen from the Union Army in "The Unvanquished" and The Unvanquished. There is a real Hickahala Creek in Mississippi, halfway between Oxford and Memphis.

A cotton press or compress is the machine that compacts the ginned cotton into tight bales. The abandoned cotton compress that Grumby and his gang of "Independents" use as a hideout is described in the Unvanquished stories as a "huge rotting building" (96). At the end of "The Unvanquished" Bayard and Ringo open the door to find Granny's murdered body lying on a floor "raised about two feet from the earth" (96), with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air.

Hawkhurst is the name of the Alabama plantation that belongs to the Hawk family in The Unvanquished stories. It is in the fictional Gihon county in the northwest part of the state, not far from the Mississippi border and about one hundred miles from Yoknapatawpha. Louisa Hawk is the sister of Rosa Millard, John Sartoris' mother-in-law. When Rosa and Bayard and Ringo visit the plantation in "Raid," it too has been burned down by Yankee troops, probably shortly after the battle in nearby Shiloh in which Dennison Hawk, the owner of the plantation, was killed.