The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

New Orleans, Louisiana, is home to both Melisandre Backus' husband - "a big rich . . . bootlegger" (187), and "the Italian consul" who helps Gavin Stevens acquire the "carved marble face" that adorns Eula's monument.

Located a mile and a half from the spring and creek bottom from which his wife carries water daily, Wilbur Provine's house has a "path worn smooth as a ribbon and six inches deep from his back door to the spring where he had walked it twice a day for two years until they caught him" for making moonshine (177) .

Yoknapatawpha County is "dry" - i.e. it is illegal to sell or possess alcoholic beverages there. But for decades the country people have surreptitiously made their own liquor in "moonshine stills." This still is owned by Wilbur Provine, who supplies moonshine to the residents of Frenchman's Bend. It is "located in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house, with a pathway worn smooth as a ribbon and six inches deep from his back door to his spring where he had walked it twice a day for two years until they caught him" (176).

The Dixie Cafe is an alternative place to Christian's drugstore to buy ice cream on the Square - Ratliff buys Chick a cone there (171). We assume it is the same 'Jefferson restaurant' that appears in other texts under four different names, including "the Cafe" in "Uncle Willy."

The town marshals, one who works in the daytime and another who works at night, have a "station" located on the Square where they can wait between their rounds (167). This is presumably a small structure designed to provide a good vantage point on the happenings of the town.

Located near the Blue Goose Cafe (167), the "gin and compress" is where the local farmers take their harvested cotton in the fall for processing: the gin mechanically separates the usable cotton from the seeds, and the compress compacts that cotton into bales for shipment outside the county.

One of the rare black-owned businesses in Yoknapatawpha, the "Blue Goose" is "a Negro cafe below the cotton gin" (167). Since it stays open "every night" until the town night marshal "runs all" the patrons out "and closes it up" (168), it may be more like a juke joint - that is, an African American night spot featuring music, dancing and gambling as well as drinking - than a restaurant.

Near to the tent where Snopeses live when they first reach Jefferson is the store that serves as the launch point for Wallstreet Panic Snopes' success story. When Wall begins working there as a janitor and "afterschool-and-Saturday clerk and errand boy," it is a "grocery store about the same class as the Snopes cafe" (135). With the money from his father's death, he buys into the store, and becomes the owner when "the old owner died" (152).

St. Louis is referred to twice in the novel. Both the bonding company that insures the public officials in Jefferson and the wholesale grocery company that supplies Wall Snopes' store are located there.

"Virginia" is where V.K. Ratliff's ancestor escaped from captivity as a prisoner of war during the American Revolution, becoming the family's first American. And Virginia, specifically Bristol, is where Miss Vaiden Wyott goes to teach after leaving Jefferson.