Northwest Road|Jefferson to Memphis in Absalom, Absalom! (Location)

Sutpen's Hundred is "a twelve mile drive" from Jefferson (15). According to Rosa, Sutpen turns the road "into a race track" on Sunday mornings (15). Judith is trying to take her father's corpse to town on this road after his death in 1869, to hold his funeral in "that same Methodist church in town where he had married her mother," but somewhere on the way along this road the mules pulling the wagon "bolt" and Sutpen's body tumbles "into a ditch" (151). Rosa and Quentin travel the other way on this road on a hot September night in 1909; he describes it this way: "the trees along the road not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl, their leaves ruffled and heavily separate like the feathers of panting fowls, heavy with sixty days of dust, the roadside undergrowth coated with heat-vulcanised dust" (143). Beyond Sutpen's place the road goes on to Memphis.