Tennessee
- Tennessee: In Blood Meridian, the main character is nameless and what the audience and other characters refer to him as changes as the story progresses. He is known as “the child” when the story begins, but is known as “the kid” for the majority of the story. The child was born with a difficult start to his life in Tennessee when his mother passed away at an early age and he was frequently mistreated by his father. Sooner than later, he ran away from home and entered a life of getting by through crime. What would make his hometown, which is not named, interesting to map out would be to see what his home was like and see if this environment influenced his behavior throughout his life. I say this because the little description we are given about his home is written in a very dark and negative tone. To see where his house was and what the valleys would look like back during the wild west period in America would be very informative as it could add context behind the rough nature of his upbringing.
- Quote: “At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun’s declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rain-blown bottomland toward night.” (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Coordinates
Latitude: 35.517491300000
Longitude: -86.580447300000
Longitude: -86.580447300000