Everyday Canvas

Yoknapatawpha – in "As I lay Dying"

Prompt: Pick a fictional place (in or out of our world) from any story, novel, or play. Imagine you are visiting that place as a tourist, and write about it as if you are a travel writer. Don’t forget to tell us your source.

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“Whoa!” The tour guide stopped his horse and patted its mane as a reward for its obedience. All three of us imitated him. “They still say Faulkner made this land up, its maps, too, however based on his stomping grounds,” he said. “But in Chickasaw language, Yoknapatawpha means split land. According to the author, the word means slow water running through the flatland.”

“So did he make up the word or not?” I asked.

“Some people still think he did,” the tour guide answered. “We'll soon be near the Yocona River, and early maps of the area called this river ‘Yockney-Patafa’ so make up your own mind.”

I glanced at the top of the pamphlet with a Faulkner quote about the land:
"Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha co., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor."

Why not? Don’t all the writers own a good amount of real estate, be it in their universe of thoughts?

We moved on. The landscape was slightly hilly with valleys in between the hills and a good number of Cedars here and there. As Darl said in the novel, “Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.” That was exactly what we were doing, riding down. On my left, I saw the forest, woods could be a better word for it, but the guide referred to it as the forest. This had to be where Lafe made Dewey Dell pregnant, who later uttered, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” Hot blind earth had to be the host for scurrying and slithering animals like rabbits, squirrels, and snakes that populated the terrain.

It was a hot late afternoon in July, just like in the novel. “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.” Long hot days were good for cotton.

A couple of hours later, we were riding by the river. A severe cold front across North Mississippi with an unusual heavy rain must have caused the Yoknapatawpha River to flood, then. The copper and the bloody egg color had to be the result of the dust in the upper atmosphere from the northern Great Plains. I recalled the dust-bowl stories, which must have affected this area with clashing colors of the sky and erosion. The erosion was controlled with the introduction of Kudzu and Loblolly pine, both alien to the land. They were planted in unnatural rows parallel to property lines. Kudzu still hung from the trees, giving the place an eerie feel. The threat mostly came from the river, though.

I remembered Darl’s words describing the flood. "Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again...
Above the ceaseless surface they stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.”

The tour guide pointed to the skeleton of an old apple tree, where the sign said Gillespie’s place. The Bundren family had spent the fourth night of their journey here, where they had put Addie's body "under the apple tree."

We were by the cemetery now. The cemetery to where the Bundrens arrived days later due to the difficulties they encountered on their journey. By the gate, my horse snorted, attracting my attention to a wagon standing, exactly as Darl described Tull’s wagon, "hitched to the rail, with the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs." Some things never changed here.

The cemetery was only three acres with a beautiful burial ground inside a gently sloping landscape filled with majestic old trees and tombstones. It put the period to the end of the journey for the Bundrens and a story of a dysfunctional family, misery, disappointments, pointless acts of heroisms, and interior monologues by several family members, even that of Addie from beyond the grave. If this wasn’t Southern Gothic, I don’t know what is.