Choctaw|Chickasaw Plantation in "Red Leaves" (Location)

The narrator of "Red Leaves" refers to the Indian settlement as "the plantation" (313). It is home to a community of Choctaws and the slaves that they own. Although no white characters appear in the story, the plantation itself reveals the presence of white settlers in the world beyond the Indians' home: they have built a quarters" to house the people they own (313), in an attempt to imitate the 'big house' of a Southern slave plantation the chief's house includes "the deck house" of a wrecked steamboat that had been hauled overland (317), and inside it are several artifacts European civilization which Issetibbeha, one of the chiefs, brought back into the woods of north Mississippi from a trip to Paris - including a "gilt bed" and "a pair of girandoles" (320). The plantation sits "in the center of ten thousand acres of matchless parklike forest where deer grazed like domestic cattle" (318); some of the woods have already been cleared by the slaves and "planted in grain" (320).