Negro Cabin on Negro Road (Location Key)

On his way to Jefferson in The Mansion, Mink Snopes turns off the highway onto what the narrative calls "a Negro road"; the term refers both to its physical characteristics - "a road marked with many wheels and traced with cotton-wisps" - and to the explanation for its primitiveness: "the people who lived on it and used it had neither the voting-power nor the money to persuade the Beat Supervisor to do more than scrape and grade it twice a year" (438). As Mink expected, the road leads to a "weathered paintless dogtrot cabin" belonging to a black family (438). The structure is "enclosed and backed by a ramshackle of also-paintless weathered fences and outhouses - barns, cribs, sheds - on a rise of ground above a creek-bottom cotton-patch" (438).