Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:48
When Mink Snopes comes to Jefferson in The Mansion, he is surprised to see something called an "Airdome" in what had been "a vacant lot"; he can hear a piano playing behind the "big high plank stockade" around the lot, but doesn't pay the ten cents to join the other people who are going inside the fence to see a new diversion: a moving picture. This is in 1908.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:47
Walking with her friends through the courthouse square on their way to the picture show, Minnie Cooper passes the drugstore, "where even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs" (181). The drugstore probably includes the "soda fountain," with its clerk who supplies Minnie Cooper with liquor, and its gatherings of younger women "shrieking and giggling with paired boys" (175).
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:47
Jefferson drugstores appear in 15 different fictions, where they often play an important role. The drugstore is where Emily buys arsenic, Dewey Dell tries to get an abortion, a hired killer from Memphis buys a tell-tale pack of cigarettes. Its rack of paperbacks is the town's only 'bookstore.' In Sanctuary the drugstore even dispenses music to the country people who stand around the doorway (112).
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:46
On their way to the movie theater, Minnie Cooper and her friends pass by this hotel, in front of which "the coatless drummers in chairs along the curb" have gathered (180).
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:46
The "pool room," as it's referred to in "Knight's Gambit," is one of the few places in Jefferson that stay open later at night (213). In that story it is located on the Square, probably near the Allnite Inn - the other place where the town's night marshal can be found in the wee hours. In Intruder in the Dust and The Mansion, where it's referred to as the "poolhall" (27, 203), it seems to be adjacent to the barbershop, and so closely connected to it in those two texts that we include the poolhall in the index entry for the Barbershop.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:45
Hawkshaw runs through "the darkened square" (175) to catch up with the lynch mob, and Minnie Cooper and her friends walk through the same square on their way to the picture show.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:43
Further away from Jefferson than the ice plant, at the end of a "narrow road" off "the highroad" from town, this "abandoned brick kiln" is described as "a series of reddish mounds and weed- and vine-choked vats without bottom" (179). It lies just beyond the ditch full of "dust-sheathed weeds" in which Hawkshaw lands after leaping out of McLendon's car. When the rest of the white men drive on with Mayes, it is implied that they lynch him at the kiln.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:42
Brick kilns appear in two fictions, in two very different ways. In "Dry September" it is at an "abandoned brick kiln" that Will Mayes is lynched, and his body presumably disposed of in one of the ruined "weed- and vine-choked vats without bottom" at the site (179). In The Town, which was published a quarter century later but set at about the same chronological moment as the story, the brick kiln is where Grover Cleveland Winbush is the night watchman, which implies it is operational.
Submitted by garrettm@u.nort... on Sat, 2012-06-09 13:41
A Negro who works as the night watchman at the local ice plant, Will Mayes is ambiguously accused by a white woman named Minnie Cooper of assault and lynched by a mob of Jefferson men. The lynching is not narrated. Although the barber says repeatedly that "I know Will Mayes" (169), and believes he is innocent, the narrative refers to him mostly as "the Negro" and does not describe him - his age or physical experience - extensively. Nor does story ever say what, if anything, happened between Will and Minnie.
