The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The captain of the slave ship that carries the servant "to America" in "Red Leaves" is described as "drunken" and from "New England" (330). During the voyage, he reads the Bible to the slaves he is transporting.

While hiding in the stable, the servant in "Red Leaves" imagines the scene of the other slaves drumming and dancing three miles away at the river. Included in the scene are the "women with nursing children," feeding them from "their heavy sluggish breasts"; they are described as "contemplative" and "oblivious of the drumming" (329).

This white man is described in "Red Leaves" as an "itinerant minister and slave trader" (318). While passing through the Indians' plantation "on a mule" that also carries "a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky," he marries Doom and his West Indian wife (318).

The Indian "doctor" who treats Issetibbeha in his last illness in "Red Leaves" weats a "skunk skin vest" (321) or "waistcoat" (329). He "burns sticks" in an unsuccessful attempt to cure his patient (322).

During his flight in "Red Leaves," the servant comes face to face with this Indian on "a footlog across a slough" (334). The Indian's appearance is explicitly contrasted with the servant's: the black man is "gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate," the Indian is "thick, soft-looking, the apparent embodiment of the ultimate and the supreme reluctance and inertia" (334). He "makes no move" while the servant rushes away (334).

The "headman" among the slaves in "Red Leaves" tells the servant Issetibbeha is still alive, and offers him food (332).

The funeral ceremonies for Issetibbeha in "Red Leaves" include "almost a hundred guests" who travel in wagons and on foot to the plantation from elsewhere (331) - when the food runs out "the guests returned home and came back the next day with more food" (336), which may mean they are Indians from other tribes or clans. They are "decorous, quiet, patient" (331), and the descriptions of them repeatedly mention the "stiff European finery" and the "bright, stiff, hard finery" they wear for the occasion (331, 339).

During his years in New Orleans in "Red Leaves," Doom is introduced by "his patron," De Vitry, into the company of the "gamblers and cutthroats of the river front" (317).

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "dressing a fowl" while listening to the unnamed old man tell the stories of the olden days (323).

In "Red Leaves" this "lad of fourteen" is "undersized," "mute," and apparently a curiosity to the Indians (328). He is tasked with guarding the slaves' drums, which are hidden in the swamp outside of the plantation.