Submitted by Mike.Wainwright... on Wed, 2019-02-20 15:39
Charles ("Chick," 196) Mallison is the "almost eighteen" nephew of Gavin Stevens. Still in high school, where he wears the uniform of a "cadet lieutenant colonel" in the R[eserve] O[fficer] T[raining] C[orps] (205), he "thirsts" for the glory that is being won by the young men already fighting in Europe (206). His uncle's "Philistine" (247), Charles learns chess, law, and not a little about life from his uncle. He plays a pivotal role in preventing the murder around which the novel's plot is organized.
In both the 1940 magazine version of "The Old People" and the revised version of it that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, the step-father of Had-Two-Fathers is "one of the slaves which [Doom] inherited" from Moketubbe (the story, 203). After impregnating a slave woman from New Orleans, Doom "pronounces a marriage" between her and "one of the slave men he has just inherited" upon becoming "The Man" (the novel, 158). But this man's place on the family tree is ambiguous.
This character is one of the more elusive in Faulkner's fiction. The Harpers Magazine version of "The Old People" creates an ambiguity when it says that "almost a hundred years ago" Ikkemotubbe sold "his own son" to a white planter, the great-grandfather of the narrator on whose farm Sam lived for most of his life (203). Since Sam is "seventy" years old (202), he could not be this man, and would have to be this man's son.
Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).
The character of Boon Hogganbeck is essentially the same in all seven of his appearances in the fiction, though in one of them ("The Bear") his name is Hoggenbeck, and his lineage changes in another. In every text he has an Indian grandmother, but when he first appears, in "Lion," she is a "Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land" (184). Beginning with his next appearance, in "The Old People," Faulkner lowers her rank: Boon's blood, the narrator says, "is not a chief's blood" (203).
The narrative introduces Doom himself as "a subchief, a Mingo, one of three children on the mother's side of the family" (317). What Faulkner means by "Mingo" is not clear. Historically, the Mingo were a tribe of Indians who would have been located along the Ohio River when this woman was born, but if her ancestry was "Mingo," it's not clear how her "family" became the ruling clan in a Mississippi tribe. What the story emphasizes is that as a woman, neither she nor her children are in the direct line of succession to the title of chief.
In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who live in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving, neither the chief of the tribe (The Man) nor his son are named. In the patriarchal society Faulkner imagines, this son is heir to the title The Man - and as the son of The Man's sister, his cousin Doom is out of the line of succession. In "Red Leaves" both The Man and his son die mysteriously after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans. In "A Justice" Doom's responsibility for their deaths is made explicit.
In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in its early history, he does not name the man who is "The Man," the hereditary chief of the tribe. His sister is the mother of Doom. In "Red Leaves," The Man and his son both die shortly after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans - presumably at Doom's hands, but that part of the story is left untold here.
When Jewel looks for Peabody in Frenchman's Bend, he learns that the doctor "had gone down below Inverness somewhere" (185). Inverness is the name of a real town in Mississippi. We use its actual location to place "Inverness" on the regional map, but with misgivings: Inverness is over 100 miles southwest of the imaginary place in northeastern Mississippi where Yoknapatawpha is located. That's a surprisingly long way for Peabody to travel in his horse-drawn carriage. (No other references to Inverness appear in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.)
In As I Lay Dying Jewel is told that Doctor Peabody "has gone down below Inverness somewhere" (185). Inverness is the name of a real town in Mississippi. We use its actual location to place "Inverness" on the regional map, but with misgivings: Inverness is over 100 miles southwest of the imaginary place in northern Mississippi where Yoknapatawpha is usually located.
