The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

These Indians meet Doom's West Indian wife and accompany her from the steamboat to his plantation.

The Negro maid accompanies the West Indian woman, Issetibbeha's mother, on her trip from New Orleans to Doom's plantation.

Doom was born "a subchief, a Mingo," one of three children from his mother, the sister of the tribe's chief (317). His birth name does not appear in this story. He is distinguished by the ambition that leads him as a young man to travel to New Orleans, where he appears as a "squat man with a bold, inscrutable, underbred face" (318). It is while living in the city that he acquires the name by which the story constantly refers to him: a Frenchman he meets there calls him "du homme," which turns into "Doom" (318).

The Negro slaves owned by the Indian tribe are described almost exclusively as a group: "a single octopus. They were like the roots of huge tree uncovered, the earth momentarily upon . . . its lightless and outraged life" (315). They adhere to their African customs, and keep ceremonial artifacts in the central cabin. The narrative characterizes them chiefly by their "fear" and "smell" (315), and the various rituals, including drumming and dancing, they practice. They treat the servant as one who is already dead, but do give him food to eat.

Three Basket is about sixty years old and like Louis Berry, described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313). He wears "an enameled snuffbox" as an earring (313). Apparently he is a kind of overseer on the Indian plantation. Along with Louis Berry, he spends six days tracking down a Issetibbeha's servant, often remembering Doom's death, which was the last time a runaway slave had to be captured and killed.

The unnamed man who was Issetibbeha's slave and body servant for twenty-three years, and so (according to a tribal custom) must be killed and buried with his master, is the story's central character. He is identified as a "Guinea man," a term which can cover the entire region of west Africa that lies along the Gulf of Guinea. He was brought as a slave to the U.S. from "Kamerun" at age 14 (327). He became Issetibbeha's "servant" not long after that. At the time of his death he is forty.