The Cave (Location Key)

"The Cave" in "A Courtship" where the competition between Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck ends is described as "a black hole in [a] hill," "a hundred and thirty miles" from the Plantation, "over in the country of old David Colbert" (374). Because of the courage required to enter it, "the Cave" serves the Chickasaws as a place for "the boys" to go "to become men" (374). There was a historical Colbert family who married into and became important figures in the Chocktaw tribes that lived along what became the Mississippi-Alabama border, so on that basis - and because west of Yoknapatawpha the land flattens out into the Delta - we have located the cave southeast of Yoknapatawpha.