The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Ab Snopes, Flem's father, "never had come no closer [to Jefferson] than that hill two miles out, where you could just barely see the water tank" (169). This likely refers to the time Ab tried to match wits with the legendary horse-trader named Pat Stamper, a story Faulkner tells in "Fool about a Horse" (1936) and retells in The Hamlet (1940).

The church in Frenchman's Bend is a "Baptist church" (334). The people in Frenchman's Bend attend it regularly, "a heap of Sundays," and for "Wednesday night prayer too" (134), and Clarence Snopes teaches "a Sunday School class" there (334). This is probably also the church at which Wesley Snopes was the "revival song-leader," until he was caught with a 14-year-old girl (79).

At least twice, Eula's suitors from Frenchman's Bend ambush the outsiders who court her at this spot, described as the "familiar bushwhacking thicket" just after the road comes "down the hill" and across "the creek bridge" (136). (In The Hamlet, which is the first text to mention this spot, there's no bridge; the road crosses the creek at a 'ford.')

The rambling estate of Will Varner. It is the only two story structure in Frenchman's Bend besides Mrs. Littlejohn's place.

A drugstore on Jefferson's Courthouse Square appears in many Yoknapatawpha fictions; The Mansion is one of the texts that explicitly identifies the store as "Uncle Willy Christian's" (60). It has the same "red and green liquid-filled jars in the windows" (36) as does the drugstore in As I Lay Dying (which is not identified with Willy), and a "drug cabinet" (60), but the narrative emphasis is on its role as an ice cream parlor with tables and "soda fountains," where "young men and girls . . . eat and drink gaudy sweet concoctions" (36).

Gavin Stevens has an office prominently placed over the hardware store on the Courthouse Square. The room features a desk with a swivel chair.

Yoknapatawpha, like real Mississippi counties, is divided into administrative districts called "beats." In all the rest of Faulkner's fictions, the highest number assigned any beat in Yoknapatawpha is 5, but in The Mansion the narrative refers to the section "way up" in Yoknapatawpha where the Nub Gowrie makes his moonshine as "Beat Nine" (67). In Intruder in the Dust (1948), Nub lives in Beat Four, in the county's northeast. Although we don't know why Faulkner chose to renumber the beat, we are locating Nine in that same northeast corner.

In a back alley off the Square, Montgomery Ward poses as a commercial photographer while actually running what V.K. Ratliff calls a "nekkid picture business" (57): in the darkness of night men from as far away as "three county seats over" visited it to view the the French postcards that Monty brought back from the First World War (62). The business, and the studio, are described in more detail in The Town.

Better known as Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state prison is a maximum-security facility that has been in operation since 1901. It is located in the Delta, the often-flooded part of the state that lies along the Mississippi River; when Mink looks out the window of the train carrying him to prison, he sees a "vast flat alluvial swamp of cypress and gum and brake and thicket . . . out of which man was still hewing savagely and violently the rich ragged fields in which cotton stalks grew ranker and taller than a man on a horse" (52).