The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The home in which, we gather, Rider has spent most of his life before marrying Mannie: "He could see the lamp in the window as he crossed the pasture, passing the black-and-silver yawn of the sandy ditch where he had played as a boy . . . the garden patch where he had hoed in the spring . . . [and] the grassless yard in whose dust he had sprawled and crept before he learned to walk" (249).

The house, we are told, is four miles from the mill, a half-mile from the commissary, and "the last one in the lane, not his but rented from the local white landowner," Carothers Edmonds. Rider has done a great deal of work on it in the six months he lived there with Mannie and on their wedding night he "built a fire on 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). After Mannie's death the house seems foreign and as he walks up to the gate he realizes "that there was nothing beyond it.

This is the lane that connects Rider and Mannie’s rented cabin, "the last one in the lane” (240), with the rest of Edmonds' property and the commissary where Mannie buys supplies. The description implies the existence of the other cabins along the lane, and so evokes the configuration of the antebellum plantation with its quarters for the enslaved workers.

Rider lives on a cotton plantation still owned by a descendant of the slave-owner who built it, but the former slave cabins are here occupied by black tenant farmers and some other Negroes, like Rider, who work elsewhere but rent cabins from that descendant. Besides Rider's cabin, only the lane on which it is located is given any descriptive presence in this story.

These are the woods Rider walks through to get home from the graveyard. From the graveyard he "crossed the road and entered the woods. It was middle dusk when he emerged from them and crossed the last field, stepping over that fence too in one stride, into the lane" (239).

Our one glimpse of the graveyard focuses on the grave site of Mannie, the protagonist's late wife as he, Rider, takes over shoveling dirt onto her coffin. We only see the African American section of the segregated cemetery in this story where the graves all resembled one another "marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read" (238).