The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This group of Negroes are "possum-hunting" in the woods when they see Joe Baker's hut burst into flame (204).

These Negroes live and work on the narrator's family farm, probably as tenant farmers. The cabins they live in may once have been part of the slave quarters. The racial and economic realities of Yoknapatawpha require them to put on the semblance of "servility," to have "recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth . . . to sustain [a buffer] between themselves and white men" on whom they depend for their subsistence (203).

This unnamed woman is both Issetibbeha's sister and Ikkemotubbe's mother. Her relationship to Sam Fathers is not entirely clear: she may be his grandmother or his great-grandmother. (This confusion is resolved in the 1942 version of "The Old People" that appears in Go Down, Moses.)

The woman introduced as "Sam's grandmother" (202, though it's possible that Faulkner meant her to be his mother) was a slave whom Ikkemotubbe bought in New Orleans, carried to Mississippi, impregnated and then compelled to marry a slave he inherits when he becomes chief of the Chickasaw clan. She is then sold by the father of her child, along with her new husband and her son, to the narrator's great-grandfather.

Typically, the "Chancery Clerk" mentioned by the unnamed narrator would have been elected to his position (204). His job would include collecting demographic data and presiding over the chancery court records, which mainly dealt with disputes about property and contracts adjudicated in the court.

These are the unnamed hunters, referred to only as "two or three others," who are part of the yearly De Spain hunting party that also includes the Major, the narrator's father, Uncle Ike McCaslin and Walter Ewell (205).

The people whom Sam Fathers calls "the People" and whom the story's title refers to as "The Old People" are the Chickasaw Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the white settlers arrived in the 1830s. As a tribe they have disappeared from the land, but a cherished part of the narrator's apprenticeship to Sam consists of the stories the old man tells him about this "race," whom neither of them "had ever known" but who survive in the tradition that Sam passes on (204).

Uncle Ike McCaslin is a significant figure in several other stories by Faulkner, best known as the central character of Go Down, Moses (1942). "The Old People" appears, in revised form, in that novel. In the magazine version of "The Old People," however, Ike is a minor character: one of the hunters who gather each November in the big woods. The fact that the narrator refers to him as "Uncle" Ike (205) may mean they are related, but he is probably using the word as an honorary title, as characters in other stories also do with Ike.

Uncle Ash, along with Jimbo, cooks for the hunters each November at Major de Spain's hunting camp. In other hunting stories Ash is identified as an employee of De Spain and probably the oldest servant who serve in the camp, but in this story he is simply seen several times riding in the wagon with "the guns and the bedding and the meat and the heads, the antlers" (206).