William Faulkner [antikvár]

chapter i FAULKNER AND MISSISSIPPI Oxford, Mississippi, county seat of Lafayette County and site of the University of Mississippi, is a town of some four thousand inhabitants lying about seventy-five miles south-east of Memphis, Tennessee, and just to the east of the low rich cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta. It is hill country here, the land eroded into deep gulches, and many of the county's inhabitants are poor white or Negro tenant farmers living in ramshackle cabins along dirt roads and scraping the barest of livings from the meagre soil. In the countryside, where buzzards wheel and Negro children run for home at the sight of white men in a car, the road passes the huts and roofed-in prayer benches of camp-meeting grounds where revival meetings are held or the remains of once-prosperous towns long since disappeared—College Hill, for example, at one time Oxford's rival, now marked by little more than a dilapidated store and a handsome church, built by slaves and with traces of the old slave gallery still clearly visible. The town itself is quiet, almost drowsy, coming alive only on Saturday afternoons, when local farmers still bring their produce into town and sell it from the backs of station-wagons or pick-up trucks, and one side of the square becomes black with Negro faces. The square, of course, is the centre of things: here stands the heavy white county courthouse, the statue of the Confederate soldier facing steadfastly to the South, the old-fashioned wooden shop-fronts, some of them still with projecting first-floor verandahs which overhang the pavements and shade loungers and passers-by from the oppressive heat of the