Indian Mound 2|Lucas' Hiding Place in Go Down, Moses (Location)

The mound where "The Fire and the Hearth" chapter begins is described as "squat, flat-topped, almost symmetrical" (37). It rises out of the flat valley in which it stands four miles away from the McCaslin-Edmonds Place. There are a number of "Indian mounds" - to use the term that, as Faulkner indicates, was coined by white people (37) - in Mississippi and elsewhere along the rivers. The indigenous peoples of the Americas constructed such earthen mounds for religious and ceremonial, burial, and elite residential purposes. The mound in Go Down, Moses attracted a team of archaeologists who conducted a dig around it. Lucas hides his dismantled moonshine still here, a mile away from its original location, considering it to be "the best place he could think of where it would be reasonably safe" (34). There is "a clump of sapling cottonwoods" (40) about fifty feet away from the mound.