The radical abolitionist John Brown fought against slavery in the West before carrying out the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 that was intended to inspire a slave rebellion in the South. In this novel, Ike McCaslin holds him up as a hero: "one simple enough to believe that horror and outrage were first and last simply horror and outrage and crude enough to act upon that" (270-71).
While we read "Fool About a Horse" as a printed text, the text itself offers a lot of evidence that the narrator is telling rather than writing it, that Faulkner intends us to imagine it as an oral tale being performed for a live audience. Twice the narrator refers to "you," for example (123, 132), and at another point addresses his audience as "gentlemen" (128); the story's repeated use of the locutions "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" also suggests the dynamic of live performance (118, etc.). This icon represents that group of implied listeners.
In the little town of Midnight, Arkansas, Ike McCaslin arranges with this man, a "translated Mississippian" and a former Confederate who, like his father, served under Nathan Bedford Forrest (267), to make sure that Fonsiba gets her legacy in installments over a long period of time.
