The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Boon’s grandmother was a "Chickasaw squaw" (215). This means that compared to Sam, who was "the son of [a] Chickasaw chief," the 'Indian blood' that runs in Boon's veins is "not chief's blood" (161). The grandmother never appears in the novel, and at times Boon even denies he has "one single drop of alien blood" in his veins at all (215).

In its account of the position Sam Fathers occupies on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation, the novel mentions the tenant farmers who "farmed allotted acres" but also acknowledges the existence of the men who do "field-work for daily wages" (161). However, although wage labor was replacing tenantry in parts of the South, no such salaried field-workers appear in the novel.

The three paragraph introductory to the novel says that "some of the descendants" of the former McCaslin slaves are named McCaslin (5), but curiously no such characters appear in the rest of the story. There the family name of the many people who are descendants of Carothers McCaslin and his slaves is Beauchamp. The novel does refer to "the other ex-slaves of old Carothers McCaslin" - other than Sam Fathers, that is - much later, noting that they farm "allotted acres" on the plantation, presumably as the Edmonds' tenant farmers (161); this group has an entry of its own in our data.

Doom "pronounces a marriage" between this man - "one of the slave men he has just inherited" upon becoming "The Man" - and the enslaved woman Doom himself has impregnated (158). Along with the woman and her child, two years later he is sold to Carothers McCaslin. He is one of the two “fathers” in Sam’s Chickasaw name, “Had-Two-Fathers,” the other of course being Ikkemotubbe himself (158).

As Lucas Beauchamp notes, the land that would have been Ike's McCaslin's inheritance was originally acquired from "the Indians back in the old time" (36). In "The Old People" the Indians are specifically identified as Chickasaws. Sam Fathers, himself half-Indian and the son of a chief, refers to the tribe as "the People" (158). Ike refuses to own the land, but Sam does pass some of their ways on to him.

Moketubbe’s "eight-year-old son" dies "suddenly" and mysteriously after his father's cousin Ikkemotubbe returns to the tribe from a sojourn in New Orleans (158). The narrative strongly implies that Ikkemotubbe kills him, using the "white powder" with which he kills a puppy after getting off the steamboat (158).

"Doom's fat cousin Moketubbe" is the son of Issetibbeha, and succeeds his father as Chief of his Chickasaw tribe (158). Moketubbe abdicates his role, however, when Ikkmotubbe returns and displays his willingness to bring death to those who might resist him.

The mother of Sam Fathers is identified in this novel only as a "quadroon slave woman" who is pregnant with Sam when Ikkemotubbe brings her back to Yoknapatawpha from New Orleans (157). In other fictions she is identified simply as a 'Negro,' but in this one narrative she is referred to as a "quadroon" - that is, someone with three white and one black grandparents (157).

The Chevalier de Vitry is the French companion whom Ikkemotubbe meets in New Orleans. The narrative suggests that this may not be his real name, or perhaps that he isn't really a "Chevalier," a minor French nobleman, since it notes that this is what he was "calling himself" when he met Ikkemotubbe (157). De Vitry is the person who gives Ikkemotubbe the title "Du Homme" - literally "of the man" in French, though Faulkner probably means "the man" - which is anglicized to "Doom," before Doom becomes chief (157).

This Chickasaw woman is the sister of a chief and the mother of Ikkemotubbe. (In later stories she will be called "Mahataha" and "Mohataha.")