Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:13
While all the land along the Tallahatchie river is swampy, two texts refer to a specific part of it as 'a swamp.' In "Red Leaves," "the swamp" (333) is where "the Negro" takes refuge, and probably where he is bitten by a "cottonmouth moccasin" (338). It is small enough in area for the Indians to "form a circle" around it, which is how they finally capture him (337).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:12
The place Rider goes to buy a jug of whiskey, it is located "in the river swamp four miles away - another clearing, itself not much larger than a room, a hut, a hovel partly of planks and partly of canvas" (246). It seems that the moonshiner who sells him the whiskey lives here.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:09
The place Rider goes to buy a jug of whiskey in "Pantaloon in Black" is located "in the river swamp four miles away - another clearing, itself not much larger than a room, a hut, a hovel partly of planks and partly of canvas" (246, 140). It seems that the moonshiner who sells him the whiskey lives here.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:08
The sawmill where Rider works is one of several sawmills in Yoknapatawpha. During the scene set there in the morning, "the trucks are rolling" and we hear "the whine and clang of the saw," and the "grunting shouts" and "chanted phrases of song" of the Negro workmen (244).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:06
This is an expansive location where Rider runs all of Sunday night and Monday morning until he goes to the sawmill. His dog overtakes "him within the first half-mile. There was a moon then, their two shadows flitting broken and intermittent among the trees or slanted long and intact across the slope of pasture or old abandoned fields upon the hills, the man moving almost as fast as a horse could have covered that ground, altering his course each time a lighted window came in sight" (243).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:04
The woods and fields near the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation appear in both Rider's and Ike's stories in the Go Down, Moses texts. In "Pantaloon in Black" this is the terrain across which Rider moves so restlessly after Mannie's funeral, through the night and early morning. His dog overtakes "him within the first half mile. There was a moon then, their two shadows flitting broken and intermittent among the trees or slanted long and intact across the slope of pasture or old abandoned fields upon the hills" (135-36).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:03
The commissary on the Edmonds plantation to which Rider’s wife, Mannie, walks a half mile each Saturday after Rider gets his weekly pay from the sawmill. A plantation "commissary" is a store where tenants can buy farming supplies and food from the same (white) man who 'shares' their crops. Mannie and Rider aren't tenant farmers, but she does her weekly shopping at the commissary. The money that she doesn't need to spend she "banks" in "Edmonds' safe" (240).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:01
Both the Sartoris plantation (in Faulkner's first Yoknatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust) and the McCaslin plantation in Go Down, Moses are still prosperous in the 20th century, worked by Negro tenant farmers instead of slaves.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 12:00
A cabin located on Carothers Edmonds’ property and alluded to in connection with Rider's cabin where, after marrying Mannie, Rider lit a fire at the hearth just as "Uncle Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds' oldest tenant, had done on his forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since" (240).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Mon, 2013-03-18 11:58
Faulkner uses the cabin that Lucas Beauchamp lives in on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation as a location in five different texts between 1940 and 1948. Lucas is a tenant farmer on the property in all five, but across them his character - and his cabin - become increasingly noteworthy and significant. In "A Point of Law" it's not much more than the place Lucas lives, with his wife Molly and daughter Nat.
