In the first five texts that mention this character, she is referred to as either "The Man's|Issetibbeha's sister" or "Ikkemotubbe's|Doom's mother." She is a member of the family of chiefs in the tribe of Indians who lived in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers began arriving, but Faulkner defines the tribe (variously called Choctaw or Chickasaw) as patriarchal, and so as a woman neither she nor her son is in the direct line of succession.
Issetibbeha is a chief of the tribe of Indians who are living in Yoknapatawpha when the white settlers arrive. The Indians are called Choctaws in Faulkner's earlier fictions, and Chickasaws, the more historically appropriate name, in the later ones. Issetibbeha is identified as the son of Doom (AKA Ikkemotubbe) in the earliest 'Indian story," "Red Leaves," but later becomes Ikkemotubbe's uncle - although at one point in Go Down, Moses he is identified as "Ikkemotubbe's father old Issetibbeha" (245). He is consistently identified as the father of Moketubbe.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:20
Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:09
Nancy Mannigoe is "about thirty . . . with a calm impenetrable almost bemused face . . . a domestic servant, nurse to two white children, the second of whom, an infant, she smothered in its cradle" in what she considers a just cause (39).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 15:00
A "newcomer in the county," Sartoris arrives in Yoknapatawpha after the death of Louis Grenier and the departure of Sutpen's architect "with slaves and gear and money too like Grenier and Sutpen . . . the sort of man who could even cope with Sutpen in the sense that a man with a saber or even a small sword and heart enough for it could cope with one with an ax" (35-36). Sartoris takes over the leadership in improving and expanding the courthouse.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Tue, 2019-01-15 14:49
"About fifty," Gavin Stevens has been Yoknapatawpha County attorney for many years (39). He is Gowan Stevens' uncle. Stevens "looks more like a poet than a lawyer and actually is a bachelor, descendant of one of the pioneer Yoknapatawpha County families, Harvard and Heidelberg educated, and returned to his native soil to be a sort of bucolic Cincinnatus, champion not so much of truth as of justice, or of justice as he sees it" (39). He appears frequently in Faulkner's fiction, beginning with "Hair" (1931).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2019-01-14 16:57
The "tame Parisian architect" who helps the settlement design their courthouse is brought into Yoknapatawpha as the "captive" of the "man named Sutpen" and Sutpen's ambition to create a "grandiose" plantation (30). The architect is described as a small man "with humorous sardonic undefeated eyes which had seen everything and believed none of it" (30).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2019-01-14 16:52
Sutpen arrives in the settlement with "thirty-odd" slaves from the Caribbean and a Parisian architect whom he also holds captive. Sutpen's grandiose ambitions include a magnificent house at the center of a vast plantation. The narrative describes him as "a big gaunt friendless passion-worn untalkative man" with an air of "anonymity and violence" (30). Sutpen is one of the principal early settlers of Yoknapatawpha (8) and he looms dominantly large as the central character of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), but he remains a minor character in Requiem.
