The "Teaberry" hotel where Montgomery Ward Snopes spends a night in The Mansion on Flem's money (79) is probably Faulkner's way of referring to the Peabody, one of the oldest, poshest hotels in Memphis. The text distinguishes it from the "dump" where Clarence Snopes spends the night, and it is not included in the narrative's reference to the "pool rooms and the sort of hotel lobbies" that Clarence patronizes (82).
Reba Rivers' house is a brothel, one of several in Memphis' notorious red-light district. The Mansion refers to this side of Memphis life in a number of passages. "Mulberry and Gayoso and Pontotoc streets" (68), "that Catalpa Street house" (305), "joints and dives and cathouses" (83) - these and other references point to prostitution as a major element in Memphis' tourist economy, at least in Faulkner's fictions.
When Mink travels to the second site where Brother Goodyhay is trying to build a church, he leaves the "lush Delta" behind and is driven into a "region of desolation," defined by its "eroded barren clay hills" (303), and ends up at "the uttermost of desolation . . . a dump, a jumbled plain of rusted automobile bodies and boilers and gin machinery and brick and concrete rubble" (304). Here Goodyhay again puts down "the stakes" and marks out the "rectangular" walls of his chapel with "string tautened rigid between them" (304).
During his time with Brother Goodyhay, Mink Snopes works to build a church in two different locations, moving from site to site in a pickup truck. The Mansion provides a good deal of description of each site, but it is virtually impossible to say with precision how the two various sites relate to each other in terms of positioning or distance, although we know that they are off the main highway between Goodyhay's house and Memphis proper.
After Goodyhay and his congregation are forced to abandon the first building site for their church in The Mansion they travel to a second site somewhere nearby. Getting there they leave the "lush Delta" behind and enter a "region of desolation," defined by its "eroded barren clay hills" (303), ending up at "the uttermost of desolation . . . a dump, a jumbled plain of rusted automobile bodies and boilers and gin machinery and brick and concrete rubble" (304).
In The Mansion, Mink Snopes works at two different locations where Brother Goodyhay is trying to build a church. Both are somewhere between Goodyhay's house and Memphis, and far enough apart that Mink moves between them by truck. The first construction site - really just a "stack of dismembered walls" - is by a "willow-grown bayou" just beyond a "plantation" with "broad cotton fields" (302).
Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest city to Yoknapatawpha, and according to the narrator, "everybody in north Mississippi [goes there] at least once a year" (372). In the novel, they go there to buy furniture, automobiles, liquor, sex, and - in Mink's case - a handgun. (See the inset map for the 18 specific locations in or near Memphis mentioned in the novel.)
According to Mink, the "house" that Houston "furnishes" his Negro employee in "a better house to live in than the one that he, Mink, a white man," lives in (10). Both houses are more probably cabins; the one Mink lives in is a sharecropper's cabin owned by Will Warner.
According to Mink Snopes in The Mansion, the "house" that Houston "furnishes" his Negro employee is "a better house to live in than the one that he, Mink, a white man," lives in (10). Mink lives in a sharecropper's cabin owned by Will Warner. The novel doesn't describe the Negro's place at all, but it's probably more accurate to think of both houses as cabins.
According to V.K. Ratliff, one of the narrators of The Mansion, Flem Snopes' father Ab "never had come no closer [to Jefferson] than that hill two miles out, where you could just barely see the water tank" (169) - an assertion that contradicts the account of him in The Hamlet.
