The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The "queen" in this story, Jenny Du Pre, is repeatedly associated with this garden. Some of the flowers that grow in it, including jasmine, are directly descended from "cuttings" that she brought from Carolina sixty years earlier (728). Now that she is confined to a wheelchair, she can only look at it from her window.

It is from this station that Narcissa takes the train to Memphis.

On plantations like the Sartorises', the pasture, a large grassy area for grazing livestock, can lie very close to the main house. On the far side of this pasture are woods with a creek running through them.

In the story "France" is referred to twice as the place where Jenny's great-great-nephew (and Narcissa's brother-in-law) Johnny Sartoris was "killed" (728, 735). In 1933, when the story first appeared, most readers would assume "killed in France" meant killed during the Great War (as the First World War was still called). Readers of Flags in the Dust would know that he was shot out of the sky while serving in the British Air Force.

Very little is known about this plantation, the place where Colonel John Sartoris and his sister Jenny were born, not even which Carolina it was in. But in this story Elnora says that during the Civil War "the Yankees" killed both Jenny's husband and her father in the fighting, then burned "the Cal-lina house" in which she was living with her mother (732). Presumably her mother died in 1869, which is the year Jenny came to live with her brother in Mississippi, bringing with her a set of colored window panes from the ruins of the family's Carolina mansion.

Founded in 1819, Memphis, Tennessee, had over 250,000 residents in 1930, making it the closest big city to Yoknapatawpha. In Faulkner's fiction, it is the place to which a number of black characters move (including Elnora's son Joby), and also the place where people from Jefferson went to misbehave (as Narcissa does). Beale Street was well-known for its black-owned shops and clubs, and the music that could be heard in them (including W. C. Handy's "Beale Street Blues").

Readers of Flags in the Dust know that "the graveyard" (727) where Simon is buried is "the negro ground" in the segregated cemetery on the northern edge of Jefferson. There are quite a few burial places in Yoknapatawpha, but this is the county's main one. The graves and memorials of the various dead members of the Sartoris family can also be found here, in the ground set aside for whites.

The Sartoris plantation house is both the center of a cotton plantation and a central site for Faulkner's imagination. Although when it first appeared in his fiction, in Flags in the Dust, it was described as having been burned down by Yankee soldiers during the Civil War and rebuilt during Reconstruction, in this story it is described as the house John Sartoris built when he first arrived in Mississippi.