Although his name evokes the way enslaved Negroes were often named, Sylvester's John is actually one of the young Chickasaw men who are interested in Herman Basket's sister - until it becomes clear that Ikkemotubbe wants her. After that, he is one of the young men who willingly help Ikkemotubbe's courtship.
Though called "Owl-by-Night" the first time he is mentioned (363), this Chickasaw is more often referred to in the story as "Owl-at-Night" (364). He is one of the young men who were interested in Herman Basket's sister - until they realized that Ikkemotubbe wanted her. After that, he willingly helps Ikkemotubbe with his efforts to win the young woman.
If Ikkemotubbe's first white friend, David Hogganbeck, evokes the spirit of the American frontier, the "white friend" who returns to the Plantation with him three years later, the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry, seems to represent a decadent old world. "Chevaliers" held a minor aristocratic rank in pre-Revolutionary France. "Soeur-Blonde de Vitry" literally translates as "sister blond from Vitry." In "Red Leaves," where the Chevalier is described in more detail, readers learn how he was responsible for Ikkemotubbe changing his name to Doom.
"Issetibbeha's sister" is also Ikkemotubbe's mother (362). She does not appear in the story, except in that genealogical role: because she is a woman, Ikkemotubbe is not in the direct line of succession to the position of "the Man" (363).
The unnamed aunt whom Herman Basket and his sister live with seems to be their surrogate parent; the rest of the Plantation often hears her voice when it is raised to scold her niece's laziness. She is also actively involved in the courtship of her niece. It is to ingratiate himself and his cause with her that Ikkemotubbe sends a pony and his gamecocks as gifts, and when the suitors won't behave she does not hesitate to threaten them with a shotgun. She feels that her family is superior to "Issetibbeha's whole family" (365).
The group of "young men" who are attracted to Herman Basket's sister includes, but is by no means limited to, Owl-by-Night and Sylvester's John (363). Without exception, these would-be suitors "look away" from her once Ikkemotubbe's interest becomes known (363). They even help him in his efforts to attract her attention. At the end of the story, at least some of these "young men" leave the Plantation on the steamboat with David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe (380), but the text does not say how far they go.
As an example of the new laws that came into the "American" part of Mississippi after Issetibbeha and General Jackson signed a treaty, the narrator mentions "the white man [who] disappeared" under suspicious circumstances; the "uproar" that followed included rumors that "he had been eaten," presumably by Indians (361). The narrator is quite sure he had not been eaten, because "he had been the sort of white man which even other white men did not regret" (361), but that is all we learn about him.
In 1829 Andrew Jackson became the seventh President of the U.S., the man who instituted the governmental policy forcibly to 'remove' the Indian population east of the Mississippi from their lands. But at the period covered in the story, he is General Jackson, the leader of several military campaigns against the Indians along the country's southern boundaries.
The narrator uses the phrase "the People" to describe the tribe to which he and the other Indian characters in the story belong, as in this sentence: "The People all lived in the Plantation now" (361). He does not explicitly say they are Chickasaws, the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in most of Faulkner's references to the indigenous population, but that they are part of the Chickasaw nation can be inferred from his reference to David Colbert as "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).
The phrase the narrator uses to describe Herman Basket's sister - "she walks in beauty" - sounds faintly 'Indian' but is actually borrowed from Lord Byron (362). Or "sat in it, that is," he adds - which sounds pretty risque, though becomes less so when he adds that she doesn't walk at all "unless she had to" (362). Like Eula Varner in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, she is lazy and slovenly but exercises an irresistible power over all the men who see her. While she is at the center of the story's courtship plot, she does not actually speak a single word in it.
