Jefferson Barbershop (Location Key)

In the 11 texts where it appears, the town "barbershop" - Faulkner seems to have spelled this as one word, though in some stories it is printed as two, and in one it is hyphenated - is identified as a very masculine environment. It is where Quentin Compson finds Dalton Ames in The Sound and the Fury. It is also a place where men of different classes can mingle - it is where Horace Benbow runs into Clarence Snopes in Sanctuary - but more typically it is associated with the kind of men who can make no claim to respectability. In Intruder in the Dust it is where the town's "young men and some not so young" hang out, "not only on Saturday afternoons but all the week too" (27), and when Joe Brown quits his mill job in Light in August one of the mill workers says that "his address from now on will be the barbershop" (45). Intruder adds the information that many of the unmarried men who live in town take their "Saturday and Sunday baths" (42) in the "bath-cabinets" behind the shop (209), and like The Mansion, pairs the barbershop with the poolhall, which seems to be contiguous with it. In the later novel, the town's "boys" can be heard behaving rowdily inside it "at two oclock Sunday morning" (203). In "Dry September" Hawkshaw's barber shop is where McLendon goes to recruit a lynch mob, though Hawkshaw himself speaks out against the idea. Hawkshaw is one of the few barbers whom Faulkner identifies by name, and he appears again in the story "Hair," which as its title suggests is organized around barbershops; in it the environment is still essentially male, though the most important 'hair' in the story belongs to Susan Reed, who is presumably not the only girl or woman whose hair is cut in the shop where Hawkshaw works.