Places: The Member of the Wedding

Georgia Member of the Wedding, Thetown. Unnamed and typically southern community that is Frankie’s hometown. Frankie spends much of this hot August weekend walking to town, downtown to her father’s jewelry store just off the main street, for example, and later to Sugarville, the Black section of town where Berenice Sadie Brown and her mother live, and to the Blue Moon, a bar where Frankie has her adventures with the red-haired soldier.

Addams home. Small house on 124 Grove Street, some blocks from the main section of town. Frankie, her cousin John Henry West, aged six, and the Addams’s cook Berenice have spent the summer sitting in the Addams’s kitchen, playing cards and talking. If Frankie feels stuck between childhood and adolescence, this house, with John Henry’s childlike drawings on the kitchen walls, and Frankie’s sleeping-porch bedroom, perfectly reflects her condition. At the end of the novel, Frankie’s father decides to move her to another house on the outskirts of town with relatives, which signals the changes that have occurred in Frankie.

Winter Hill. Georgia site of the wedding of Frankie’s brother Jarvis and Janice Evans, and the goal of all Frankie’s dreams. Frankie plans to break out of her preadolescent jail by joining Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon; after the wedding her father has to drag her out of their car. Winter Hill (like much of the novel’s imagery) thus symbolizes the freedom that maturity will bring, in contrast to Frankie’s hot, last summer of childhood.