The Mississippi River figures in two different ways in the novel. It is the route followed by the steamboats on which characters travel between Yoknapatawpha and New Orleans, as would historically have been the case in the decades before railroads appeared in the region; in particular the deck of a steamboat moving on the moving river - "suspended immobile and without progress from the stars themselves" (250) provides a very resonant site for Charles Bon's musings on his identity. And as "that Continental Troth, that River which runs . . .
The Mississippi River figures in a number of Yoknapatawpha fictions, as one would expect, since before the railroads and the automobile the River was a major thoroughfare for people going to or leaving places like Yoknapatawpha, and the main way cotton was shipped from Mississippi plantations to northern factories. As the "Appendix Compson" notes, "the whole Mississippi Valley" (327) is the immense area drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
When Sutpen first arrives in Jefferson, it is clear that he is "no younger son sent out from some old quiet country like Virginia or Carolina" (11) - as elsewhere in Faulkner's fictions, for example, the first Sartoris and the first McCaslin in Yoknapatawpha are originally from "Carolina." In this context, "Carolina" (not specifically North or South Carolina) is associated with social prestige, an aristocratic pedigree. The novel does mention Charleston, South Carolina, several times, with the implication that it may be culturally superior even to Richmond, Virginia (188, 100).
Founded in 1819, Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest big city to Yoknapatawpha County, and appears more frequently in Faulkner's novels and stories than any other out of Yoknapatawpha location. In Absalom! its first mention is as the "Memphis market" where one could go to "buy livestock or slaves" (31), a locution that recurs in its last mention ("trips to Memphis . . . to buy live stock or slaves," 268). It is also where Ellen takes Judith to buy her bridal trousseau (55), and where Judge Benbow goes to bet on horse races (172).
New Orleans is a major location in Absalom, though the representation of it is almost entirely constructed by characters who may never have been there. It is first mentioned as the place that the French architect who designs Sutpen's plantation goes "back to New Orleans" when he leaves the county after two years; this suggests that Sutpen probably came through New Orleans on his way to Yoknapatawpha (26). The city is most elaborately evoked by Mr. Compson in Chapter 4, during his reconstruction of the visit Bon and Henry pay to New Orleans on the eve of the Civil War.
Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard is the oldest university in the U.S. The last four chapters of the novel are set, formally, in the dorm rooms that Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon occupy as Harvard freshmen. Few details about the setting are provided, but as the site of Quentin and Shreve's sustained attempt to reconstruct the story of Thomas Sutpen, it is introduced as a kind of antithesis to Mississippi: "this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow" (141). Their dorm room is later described as a "warm and rosy orifice above the iron quad" (176).
When Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon comes into Jefferson, he is usually found "blind or violently drunk in the negro store district on Depot Street" (170). It's not clear what Faulkner means by "negro store" - whether these are businesses owned by Negroes, or just patronized by them. In other Yoknapatawpha novels the part of town where blacks live is variously called "Negro Hollow," "Freedman Town," and so on.
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, Jefferson's black population lives in two different places. The domestic servants who are employed by the town's older families typically live behind their employers' houses (as was the case with Faulkner's own "mammy," Caroline Barr). Most of the rest of the black population lives in an area west of the Square. This area wears several different names in the Yoknapatawpha fictions: Freedman Town, Negro Hollow, Nigger Hollow. Three texts suggest the possibility that within this part of town there are businesses that are owned by Negroes.
On different occasions, Sutpen and Judith both visit General Compson in his office in town. Compson appears in the novel in the roles of cotton planter and Confederate officer, but not in any role that would require an office in town, so we have to speculate about both the exact location and the purpose of this office. In The Sound and the Fury his son is a lawyer, so that might be the General's other occupation; it would explain why the office is near the courthouse (163), and why Judith seeks his help in the courtroom.
