West Indies (Location Key)

During the 18th and 19th centuries European-owned plantations in the West Indies used enslaved labor to produce so much of the world's sugar that they became known as "the Sugar Islands." That is the context for the two references in Faulkner's fiction to those islands. In "Red Leaves" Issetibbeha's mother is rumored to have come from a "well-to-do West Indian family" (318). In Requiem for a Nun the language spoken by the slaves that Sutpen brings to Yoknapatawpha is identified by Compson as "the Caribbean-Spanish-French of the Sugar Islands" (30). Two of the countries in the West Indies - Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, and Martinique - are specifically named in Absalom, Absalom! and have their own entries in this index.