Where It All Goes Down
Jefferson, Mississippi, Near the Start of the Twentieth Century
We have to zoom back a bit to get where Faulkner is coming from in this story. It's set in the U.S. South—in the fictional town of Jefferson in the nonfictional state of Mississippi, to be exact—roughly at the start of the twentieth century. We know this from the recent appearance of "motor cars" (1.1)—as in, you know, cars.
The time is shortly after 1896, when the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, decided segregating public schools by white students and black students was lawful.
And the town is as segregated as post-Plessy schools. The black part of town is called Negro Hollow, and the white part seems to be pretty much everywhere else: the bank, the jail, the two-story home in which the white family lives. Dividing the whole segregated shebang is a very symbolic ditch. (Read more about it over in our "Symbols" section.)
So this story is set in a time of serious discrimination, and in one of the former slave states to boot. All that probably goes quite a way toward explaining why Quentin begins his memories without fretting over the complete division, in Jefferson, of black women doing white families' laundries. That kind of creepily racist division of labor was normal.
The setting also explains why Nancy has little to no power. All the abuse from Mr. Stovall and the jailer, the lack of support from the family she works for—that is a sign of the times in which this story is set. And yes, it still has relevance for us today, since prejudice and discrimination persist.