The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "Red Leaves" this group of Indians meets Doom's West Indian wife and accompanies her from the steamboat to his plantation.

In "Red Leaves" this is one of the groups of Indians who are waiting to pursue the servant.

In "Red Leaves" these runners and couriers provide information to Moketubbe during the hunt for the servant.

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "shelling corn" while listening to the old man tell tales of yore (323).

In "Red Leaves" the tribe's women stay on the plantation with the old men and children rather than participate in the chase after the servant.

Although the Indian children in "Red Leaves" stay home with the tribe's women and old men, these "big boys" are sent out with the men of the tribe to hunt down and capture the servant (334).

In "Red Leaves" 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 French monarch Louis XV, mentioned in "Red Leaves," ruled from 1 September 1715 until he died in 1774. During his visit to France, Issetibbeha acquires some furniture and red slippers that allegedly belonged to the monarch.

In "Red Leaves" the character named Had-Two-Fathers appears only once, briefly, as one of the men who tell Moketubbe he should take off the red slippers (336). He is not the character Faulkner created later, also named Had-Two-Fathers but better known as Sam Fathers; this later character will play important roles in seven of the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The tribe of Indians in "Red Leaves" is not given a name. In his later fictions Faulkner identifies the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha first as "Choctaw," then as "Chickasaw." Historically, they were part of the Chickasaw nation, but Faulkner's Indians are not particularly historical. For example, in this story they are associated several times with cannibalism (314, 319).