The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

When the Chickasaw chief Issetibbeha is first mentioned, in "The Old People" chapter, he is identified by the narrator as the uncle of Ikkemotubbe (157). In "The Bear" chapter, however, Ike McCaslin refers to “Ikkemotubbe’s father old Issetibbeha” when speaking with Cass Edmonds (245).

Ikkemotubbe is a Chickasaw Indian chief (known among the People as "The Man") who reached that position by poisoning and intimidating the male heirs to it. For generations, the Indians lived on the land that Ikkemotubbe would sell to Thomas Sutpen. As a young man, during a trip to New Orleans, he made the acquaintance of someone "calling himself the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry," who in turn began calling him "Du Homme," literally "of the man" in French (though Faulkner may have meant "the man").

General Compson is the oldest member of Major de Spain’s hunting parties, and the Compson who appears most frequently in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His age, his social status, and his experience in the Civil War and at the hunt lend him an air of authority in Go Down, Moses, and no one argues with his pronouncement that Ike McCaslin, though still a boy, "is a better woodsman" that almost everyone else in the group that goes after Old Ben (224). As an old man, one of Ike's very few possessions is the hunting horn which "General Compson had left him in his will" (345).

There are two "Major de Spain"s in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. This is the one who actually served in the Confederate Army during the War (his son only inherited the title "Major" from him). His military service during "the last darkening days of '64 and '65" is briefly referred to in this novel (224), but otherwise here he is best known for hosting biannual hunting parties at his camp on the Tallahatchie River.

He is a regular and highly-regarded member of Major de Spain's hunting parties, known for his unerring aim with a rifle.

Boon is a fixture at Major de Spain’s hunting camp. His grandmother was a Chickasaw woman, though as he text says, "he was a white man" - meaning that he lived among whites as one of them (161). He is described as “a mastiff, absolutely faithful . . . hardy, generous, courageous enough, a slave to all the appetites and almost unratiocinative” (161-162).

Sam Fathers is "an old man, son of a Negro slave and an Indian king" (281). His father is Ikkemotubbe. His enslaved mother is identified earlier as a "quadroon" (158), that is, a slave who has three white grandparents. Yet although in this novel Sam is more Indian and white than he is black, he is nonetheless forced to live as a 'Negro' in Yoknapatawpha, until he leaves such social stratification behind by returning to the wilderness.

The other inmates of the county jail where Rider is being held are described in crude burlesque terms when the deputy sheriff tells his wife how he ordered them to try to restrain Rider in the jailhouse: he calls them "the chain-gang niggers" and describes them as "a big mass of nigger arms and heads and legs boiling around on the floor” (151).

The suggestively named Ketcham is the lawman at the jail whose job it is to maintain order among the inmates; he is there when Rider is brought in.

The man Rider kills belongs to the large Yoknapatawpha family of Birdsongs; the deputy sheriff tells his wife how large it is: "It's more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There's forty-two active votes in that connection" (148). As voters they have a lot of influence with the county sheriff, but it's clear from both what the deputy says and the events of the story that as a clan the Birdsongs aren't going to rely on the law to punish Rider for killing one of their own.