Melon Patch on Indian Plantation in "Red Leaves" (Location)

Walking past the melon patch on his way to fish in the creek, Issetibbeha first sees the woman who will be Moketubbe's mother working there. Perhaps Faulkner included this kind of 'field work' as (like slavery) an example of what the Choctaw Indians - the tribe in the story - learned from the arriving white settlers, or perhaps to reinforce the implicit similarity between Doom's "plantation" (313) and the slave plantations some of those settlers built, but in fact the Choctaw people farmed land in Mississippi long before they had any contact with whites.