IkkemotubbesInNC

The Chickasaw tribe is still living in Yoknapatawpha at the time this story takes place. Their chief when the first white pioneers arrive is "old Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw King" (200); Issetibbeha becomes a "friend" of one of them, Doctor Habersham (202). By the time the main events of the story take place, Issetibbeha has died, but there is no mention of how. Ikkemotubbe is named as his "successor," the chief who "cedes" the land in Mississippi "to the white men" for land in the Oklahoma territory (200), and the Chickasaw who help the whites at one point are called "Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) - but Ikkemotubbe himself does not appear in the narrative. Yet the story of how Jefferson got its name adds a new dimension to the story of the Ikkemotubbe's family at both of its chronological ends. After four previous appearances, Ikkemotubbe's mother is finally given a name: Mohataha. As "the Chickasaw matriarch," she almost even usurps the role the narrative originally gave to her son, for it is she who "signs all the conveyances as her son's kingdom passed to the white people, regularizing it in law anyway" (210). How she acquired this legal authority is not explained, at least in the story; as scholars have noted, Faulkner's Mohataha is based on a historical Chickasaw matriarch named Hota, whose mark can still be seen on land deeds in the real Lafayette County. And it is Mohataha's unnamed granddaughter who, as she leaves Yoknapatawpha for Oklahoma along with the tribe, marries a white man, the son of her great-uncle's friend Habersham, leaving open the possibility of a new future for the family.