The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "A Justice" "the Willow-Bearer" - his name never appears without the definite article - apparently performs an undefined ceremonial function related to the selection of the new "the Man" - the tribal chief whose title also always includes the "the" (349).

The tribe's doctor is mentioned only negatively, when he fails to arrive in time to "burn sticks" (349) when the Man falls ill and dies.

In "A Justice," "the People" is the collective term for Doom's tribal members, and they are differentiated from "the black people" (351, 355). The People as a tribe are also often segregated by gender, as when "all the men sleep in the House" (350), or when on the way to the steamboat, the women walk while the men ride in wagons (351). In this early story the Indians are identified as Choctaws; later Faulkner will consistently refer to the Indians who lived in the land that became Yoknapatawpha as Chickasaws.

In his account of the first time Coppermine (AKA Forked Lightning) raced against Acheron, Parsham Hood briefly mentions "that Memphis boy" who was riding the horse (220). This jockey may be white and an actual "boy" - as Lucius is when he rides (220). But "boy" is also the term that Faulkner's southern society applies to a black man of almost any age up to 30 or more, and it's on that basis that we identify him as black, like McWillie, the jockey on the horse he is racing against.