At least one of the Scenes in the three-act drama in Requiem for a Nun is set in the Jefferson apartment where Gowan and Temple Stevens live. Faulkner's stage direction describes the apartment building as "an old house, an ante-bellum house," that has been cut up into apartments and "modernized"; the living room where Act I, Scene II, occurs is "smart, modern, up-to-date," but also expressing "the air of another time" (41). There is some confusion, however, about this setting. Later Temple herself says that "the Gowan Stevenses" live in "a new bungalow on the right [i.e.
According to Requiem for a Nun, as part of the growth of the town of Jefferson a number of "new subdivisions" with names like "Fairfield or Longwood or Halcyon Acres" are built on lots "which had once been the lawn or back yard or kitchen garden of the old residences" (196). The "new minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward" are ranged around "the old obsolete columned houses" of an earlier day (196).
The coal house next to the county jail becomes a makeshift jail itself when Temple and Gavin Stevens visit Nancy Mannigoe in Requiem for a Nun. In a disconcerting reminder of the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, the jailer shows deference to the couple's white race by moving the five "other nigger prisoners" to "the coal house" behind the jail (208). Ordinarily this shed is where the coal used for heating and cooking is stored.
Confederate troops and Union troops are seen separately in Yoknapatawpha in a number of texts with Civil War settings, but this location in Requiem for a Nun is connected with one of the few instances where they encounter each other. When Union forces attack Jefferson during the Civil War, the Confederates fall back from the fighting at the creek on the Sartoris plantation "to a stronger line on the river heights south of the town" (182). There does not seem to be any fighting here, though after the Confederate retreat the Yankees occupy and burn the town itself.
The "icy road" where Bayard Sartoris is killed when his grandson loses control of the car he is driving (190). This is a climactic event in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust.
"Frenchman's Bend" - the name of Louis Grenier's plantation - becomes the name of the "section of country surrounding a little lost paintless crossroads store" after the 'Frenchman' himself leaves the county (26). In the other Yoknapatawpha fictions in which it appears, this store is owned by Will Varner.
In the early days of Yoknapatawpha, outsiders often reached the area by traveling by steamboat up the Tallahatchie River (also referred to in the novel as "Ikkemotubbe's old river," 176) to a "landing" that was originally "Ikkemotubbe's" too, but "which Sutpen now owned" by the time the marble columns for the courthouse arrived there on the last leg of their trip from Italy (36).
The Chickasaw tribe in Yoknapatawpha calls their village their "plantation," "patterning [i.e. imitating] the white people" who settle in the county (28). Only mentioned in the novel, this "plantation" is described in detail in stories like "Red Leaves" and "A Courtship."
