This novel takes place in northeastern Yoknapatawpha, the part of the county where the MacCallums and the McCallums live, and the narrative includes the family in its list of other families in the area: "Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts and McCallums" (33) - though elsewhere the economic and social standing of MacCallum|McCallum family is considerably higher than these others'. No McCallums directly appear, but one is mentioned by name: Buddy.
In this story, written as the U.S. is on the verge of entering World War II, Faulkner returns to the MacCallum home in northeast Yoknapatawpha, though again this time MacCallum is spelled McCallum. The sons of the family are now two decades older than in Flags in the Dust (1929) but still the embodiment of the best masculine traditions of an older South. Their father, the patriarch who fought with Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War and built the family home, is now named "Old Anse" rather than Virginius; he has been dead for fifteen years.
It seems likely that the "Anse McCallum" who bought one of the Texas ponies in the past and the "McCallum" who makes the moonshine Ratliff carries with him are two different members of the family that Faulkner had spelled "MacCallum" in two earlier novels, but the references are so short that it's hard to know for sure. In those texts there is no "Anse" in the family, but Faulkner may be thinking of the MacCallum family patriarch, Virginius.
Two MacCallums are mentioned in this novel, though only one by name. The twin brother of Rafe is at Samson's when the Bundrens pass by. Readers of Flags in the Dust know this brother is Stuart. Samson, however, can only refer to him as Rafe's twin: "I have known him from a boy up; know his name as well as I do my own. But be durn if I can say it” (119).
The patriarch of the MacCallum family, Virginius, was sixteen in 1861 when the Civil War began - not too young to "walk [from Mississippi] to Lexington, Virginia," where Thomas Jackson was at the time, and enlist in "the Stonewall brigade" (332). Sixty years later he remains an unreconstructed Confederate and a cultural link to the Old South.
Boon Hogganbeck is one of the major characters in Faulkner's last novel. According to the narrator, "His grandmother had been the daughter of one of old Issetibbeha's Chickasaws" (19).
Mahataha (as Faulkner spells "Mohataha" here) is the only member of the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family mentioned in this novel, where she displaces her son in the story of the Compson family. In his "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury (1946), Faulkner identifies Ikkemotubbe as the "American king" who granted the Compson patent; in The Mansion, however, it is Mahataha who grants the property "to Quentin Compson in 1821" (367).
The Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family is evoked twice in the novel, in Chapters 19 and 20. In the first, Charles Mallison refers to "the old days of Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief, and his sister's son Ikkemotubbe whom they called Doom" (321). In the second, as Gavin Stevens looks down at Yoknapatawpha from the "ridge" beyond Seminary Hill and back through the twilight to the history of the county, the first human presences he conjures up are "old Issetibbeha, the wild Chickasaw king, with his Negro slaves and his sister's son called Doom who murdered his way to the throne" (331).
When Faulkner adds the events of "A Name for the City" to the larger story of Yoknapatawpha he tells in the prose sections of Requiem for a Nun, he adds quite a bit of substance to Mohataha's role as "the Chickasaw matriarch" (17). At her first mention she is still identified in a context that is defined by the men in her family: "Ikkemotubbe's mother and old Issetibbeha's sister" (17). But these men are merely mentioned.
The Chickasaw tribe is still living in Yoknapatawpha at the time this story takes place. Their chief when the first white pioneers arrive is "old Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw King" (200); Issetibbeha becomes a "friend" of one of them, Doctor Habersham (202). By the time the main events of the story take place, Issetibbeha has died, but there is no mention of how.
