The Indians in "Red Leaves" - or at least the tribal chief, the Man - practice polygamy, as is clear from the reference to "Issetibbeha dying among his wives" (329). This is Issetibbeha's "newest wife" (321), not Moketubbe's mother but the woman who tells him Moketubbe has hidden the red slippers that he has always coveted. She is unwilling to sleep in the gilt bed that Issetibbeha brought back from Paris, but no other details about her are provided.
The "young woman" in "Red Leaves" whom Doom seduces in New Orleans is first described as the "daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family" (318). She is mainly white, but when her son Issetibbeha remembers her a few pages later, the narrative explicitly refers to "her Negro blood" (321). Given the casualness of the later reference, Faulkner might have expected his readers to read the designation "West Indian" as code for racial mixing in the first description, though that's by no means certain.
In "Red Leaves" the "son and brother" of the well-to-do family of Issetibbeha's mother presumably also has some "Negro blood," as she does (321). But his behavior links him to the upper class: after Doom gets his sister pregnant, he seeks him out "with a pistol" (318) to avenge the family's honor. Years later, however, as the "maternal uncle" of the child she bears, this brother "conducts" Doom on a trip abroad, to Paris and elsewhere in Europe (320).
The head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish the generation of "uncles" from the generation of "cousins" (319).
At the head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish between the two generations in any way (319).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:37
Gowan Stevens is the husband of Temple Drake Stevens, the father of Bucky and the murdered infant, and the second cousin (or nephew) of Gavin Stevens. At the time of the action of Requiem for a Nun, Gowan is a reformed alcoholic, sober for eight years. He is one of those "alumni of the best colleges, South or East, where they belonged to the right clubs; married now and raising families yet still alumni of their schools, performing acceptably jobs they themselves did not ask for, usually concerned with money: cotton futures, or stocks, or bonds" (54).
This is not the Indian named "Had-Two-Fathers" who plays a minor role in "Red Leaves." This is the character best known as Sam Fathers, though as he tells Quentin Compson in Faulkner's second Indian story, "A Justice," his Indian name was "Had-Two-Fathers" too (345). In that story he is the child of a Choctaw named Crawfish-ford and an enslaved woman whom Doom, the chief, won gambling on a Mississippi riverboat.
In five texts Moketubbe is the son of Issetibbeha, and so, according to Faulkner's representation of Indian society, the heir to the title of 'The Man,' or chief of the tribe that lives in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers begin arriving. The only one that shows him as the chief is "Red Leaves," Faulkner's first 'Indian story,' which begins after the death of his father.
The Choctaw|Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe appears in fourteen texts, more than any of the other Indian characters in the fictions. His significance in most of them is either as Sam Fathers' father or as the chief who sold or traded Indian land to white settlers like Compson and Sutpen, but his own story is a fascinating one. It is first told - in two pages!
