Uncle Willy's House (Location Key)

Willy Christian was born and still lives in "a little old neat white house . . . on the edge of town" ("Uncle Willy," 225). It could have been built in the antebellum era, since that is when his father opened the drug store that Willy also inherited. The house is on "a little quiet side street where the other houses are all little new ones" (237). The neighborhood is a lower-middle-class one: his new neighbors are "country people who had moved to town within the last fifteen years, like mail carriers and little storekeepers" (237). Presumably Willy's much older house is at the far end of the street, since the property includes both a "pasture" and the "barn" in which he hides his three-gallon "can of alcohol" (235). The narrator does not specify which "edge of town"; our decision to locate the house in the southwestern part of Jefferson is based on two narrative details: that Willy walks through the Negro section of town on his way home from the Square (234), and that, when his wife drives back to Memphis, she drives "across the square" (238).