Jefferson High School (Location Key)

The school system in Jefferson remains segregated throughout the fictions, so white and black students never learn together under one roof. But how many white public schools there are in town is hard to determine. It seems clear in some fictions that Faulkner imagines that Jefferson has only one building for white students in all grades from 1st to 12th - though there's never any suggestion of a one-room schoolhouse in the town, like the one in the much smaller Frenchman's Bend. In other fictions it's not clear how many school buildings there might be; in these cases we create just one location. But when Charles Mallison says in The Town that since Linda Snopes is "in high school" and he goes to "grammar school," there's no way he can say if she's "still going to school or not" (197), at least this once Jefferson High has its own building. And since that happens in The Town, we assume that is also the case in the other three texts that mention the high school specifically: Intruder in the Dust, where Charles is on "the high school football team" (121); "Knight's Gambit," where Gavin Stevens Gavin mentions "Jefferson High" in his listing of schools (172); and The Mansion, where Essie Meadowfill is "valedictorian of her high school class" (361). Unfortunately, none of these texts provide an indication of where in Jefferson the high school's building might be.