The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The eight-year-old unnamed son of Moketubbe would have succeeded his father as head of the Chickasaw Indian clan. Although his unexpected death is not explicitly identified as homicide, there are contextual suggestions that he was murdered by his second cousin, Ikkemotubbe, as part of Ikkemottube's plan to wrest control of the tribe from Moketubbe.

Moketubbe is a Chickasaw chief, the son of Issetibbeha, and the cousin of Ikkemotubbe. Moketubbe relinquishes his position as tribal chief because he is afraid that his ruthless cousin Ikkemotubbe will poison him.

In the later Yoknapatawpha fictions the De Spain's became one of the most powerful families in Yoknapatawpha business and politics. There are at least two characters called "Major de Spain," though only one was a real Confederate Major. The one in this story appears to be the son of that man, given the title "Major" as a courtesy (though when Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses he moved it back a generation in time, making the De Spain in that novel the real Major).

Called both Joe Baker (by the narrator, 205) and Jobaker (by himself, 204), he is a full-blooded Chickasaw Indian and friend of Sam Fathers. His history is unknown. According to the narrator, he "lived in a foul little shack at the fork of the creek four or five miles" from the narrator's farm (204). Living as a hermit, he hunted and fished for his livelihood. He would sometimes visit Fathers in the blacksmith shop, where the two old men spoke "a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect" with an occasional word or two in the old Chickasaw vocabulary (205).

Jimbo helps Uncle Ash with the cooking and with the blood hounds on Major de Spain's yearly hunting trips into the big woods. He is a trusted member of the hunting party. (When Faulkner re-tells the events of "The Old People" in Go Down, Moses, Jimbo is replaced by a man named "Tennie's Jim" (160) who turns out later in the novel to be James Beauchamp, one of the Negro descendants of Carothers McCaslin. But it's unlikely that as Faulkner wrote this story he was thinking of a spot for Jimbo on the McCaslin family tree.)

Issetibbeha is the uncle of Ikkemotubbe. Issetibbeha was chief of the Chickasaw tribe that Sam Fathers descends from. Moketubbe, Issetibbeha's son, becomes chief after his father's death, but he relinquishes his authority to the dangerous Ikkemotubbe.

A Chickasaw chief, Ikkemotubbe is also known as Doom, a corruption of the French "Du Homme," a nickname given him by his friend Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry, whom he met after running away to New Orleans as an adolescent (202). This 1940 magazine version of "The Old People" seems to suggest that Doom is both Sam Fathers' grandfather (202) and father (203). When Faulkner revised the story for inclusion in Go Down, Moses (1942), he made it clear that he was Sam's father.

The name of Boon Hogganbeck's grandmother is not mentioned in "The Old People." She is identified by her tribe, Chickasaw. She had sexual relations with at least one white male, and her miscegenated progeny also had sexual relations with at least one white as the narrator says that the "blood" in Hogganbeck's family line "had run white since" his grandmother's sexual relationship Boon's white grandfather (203).

Boon Hogganbeck is of Native American and white ancestry. His grandmother was Chickasaw, although according to the narrator "Boon was a white man," i.e. lived with the privilege of whiteness (203). Unlike the miscegenated Sam Fathers, whose looks indicate his "chief's blood," Boon's appearance lacks any sign of nobility (203). Unlike the narrative, Boon himself cannot conceive that anyone is "better born than himself," though he gratefully accepts the subservient place he occupies among the rich white hunters of Yoknapatwpha (203).

Walter Ewell was a sharp-shooting hunter, one of Major de Spain's hunting buddies in the 1870s and 1880s. The narrator says that when Ewell fires his rifle he always hits his target. Ewell also has a sense of humor about his less prodigious deer kills.