The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The station lies at the base of "the plateau on which the town proper had been built" (160).

There are quite a few burial places in Yoknapatawpha, but this one, reached by driving up "a narrow lane" at "the edge of town" (396), seems to be the main one in Yoknapatawpha. It is segregated. In the "whitefolks' section" lie the Sartorises (397). The graves of Colonel John, Old Bayard, Young Bayard and his twin brother John are specifically mentioned. Simon Struthers' grave is "the negro ground" (397).

"The house was a cabin," writes the narrator as Bayard approaches this location (360). Throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions the distinction between 'houses' and 'cabins' is often a racial one, as it apparently is in this case - i.e. 'cabins' are where Negroes live. In this case its occupants are a husband, a wife and three children, none of whose names are ever given. It is further from Jefferson than the MacCallum place, on the road but in a very isolated part of the country, but how much further is not specified.

This spot is one of those Yoknapatawpha locations that changes dramatically, depending on Faulkner's imaginative concerns at different points in his career. On Faulkner's two maps of Yoknapatawpha the spot is home to two families, with three different names: the MacCallums (in Flags in the Dust), whose name is spelled McCallum in two later texts; and the McCaslins (in Go Down, Moses and elsewhere).

Located in the town cemetery on a height overlooking the railroad he built, Colonel John Sartoris' "effigy and statue" wears a frock coat and an expression described as that "haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity" (399). There seems to be no question but that Faulkner based it on the statue of his great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, in the cemetery at Ripley, Mississippi.

"A low, broken-backed log house" (279), a mile from the river bottom, where Minnie Sue Turpin lives. Byron stops here during his flight from Yoknapatawpha, either to ask her to leave with him or to try to get her to have sex with him. In any case, her only response is to tell him to "come back tomorrer" (281). Byron gets there by turning off the main road some distance past Varner's store, then driving half an hour "along a rutted wagon road, between swampy jungle, at a snail's pace" (278).

The narrative describes the scene in some detail: "The road descended in a quiet red curve between pines" to where "a creek ran beneath a stone bridge" (213). But the cues to its location on the map are subtler. As Pappy and John Henry drive the injured Bayard toward help, we learn that the road "emerges from the trees," then "crosses the flat valley" to "join the highway" (218). Because they stop at the highway to decide whether to drive Bayard to town or to the Sartoris place, this must be north of town.

According to the narrative, the jail is "not far" from Courthouse Square (154). Though young Bayard is taken there unofficially to spend the night after having too much to drink, we're told the building looms "above its walled court, square and implacable, its slitted upper windows brutal as sabre blows" (154).