The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

On his way to Jefferson, Mink Snopes turns off the highway onto what the narrative calls "a Negro road"; the term refers both to its physical characteristics - "a road marked with many wheels and traced with cotton-wisps" - and to the explanation for its primitiveness: "the people who lived on it and used it had neither the voting-power nor the money to persuade the Beat Supervisor to do more than scrape and grade it twice a year" (438). As Mink expected, the road leads to a "weathered paintless dogtrot cabin" belonging to an African-American family (438).

"The Junction" in this novel that Mink passes through on his way to Jefferson (435) is almost certainly the same place as the "Memphis Junction" and "the Junction" referred to earlier in the novel (37, 313), and the location Faulkner also calls "Memphis Junction" on his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha. The map locates it due north of Jefferson, and the novel puts it within "thirty miles of Jefferson" (435).

The novel's two references to Yoknapatawpha's postal system seem to span the transition from the old-fashioned to the modern. It describes "the small lot behind the postoffice where the RFD carriers' buckboards would stand until the carriers came out the back door with the bags of mail" (41); RFD - Rural Free Delivery to people living in places like the Yoknapatawpha countryside - began in the late 19th century, though horse- or mule-drawn "buckboards" were replaced by trucks and cars in most rural areas by the 1920s.

After the Compson Place burns down, Jason uses the insurance money and "borrow[s] a little more on the now vacant lot" to build a "new brick bungalow up on the main street to the Square" (355).

Jackson, the capitol of Mississippi, figures in the novel in several ways. It is the site of the state legislature to which Clarence Egglestone Snopes is elected. Gavin Stevens' "classmate" has a plantation near Jackson (425). And "the asylum" - that is, the Mississippi State Insane Asylum - to which Mink's lawyer argues Mink should be sent is located there (51).

The novel doesn't say what is produced by the mill that Ratliff calls "Uncle Bill Varner's water mill" (347), the site of "the annual Varner's Mill picnic" (326). The Town clearly refers to "Uncle Billy Varner's saw mill" (33), but the different word Faulkner uses in this novel makes it unlikely that this mill is used to turn trees into lumber. As a "water" mill this one relies on water power from the "mill pond," which collects water behind "Varner's mill-dam" that is periodically released to drive the machinery (347-48).

While they work to build their own church, Goodyhay's congregation meets in what Mink characterizes as a former "nigger schoolhouse" (304) just beyond a crossroads. This make-shift church is "an unpainted box of a building" lying in "empty" country (304) "on the edge of Memphis" (296). Its large interior is depicted in a similar manner with "backless benches" for the congregation and, at the front of the room, a "plank laid across two saw-horses" for Brother Goodyhay himself (307).