The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The mother of the mail rider was "from old Ferginny" (23). When she named him "Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew," hoping that he might have "luck" from that famous name, she also indirectly provided the county seat of Yoknapatawpha with its name (23). According to her son, however, "She didn't mean luck. She never had any schooling. She didn't know the word she wanted to say" (23).

Thomas Jefferson, an American distinguished by many interests, talents, and achievements, was chosen by the mail-rider Pettigrew's mother to bring her son "luck," (23), which might better be understood as "respect." He also created the original "plan" for the city of Jackson, Mississippi - "seventeen years" before the city's location was determined (85).

"We already got a church - that's Whitfield's cabin," Peabody tells Pettigrew (23). Whitfield is probably a lay preacher, and the first of a number of preachers in his family. A "Reverend Whitfield" (probably one of this Whitfield's descendants) is a major character in As I Lay Dying and appears in several other Faulkner fictions.

The Carolina blacksmith who made the lock for the settlement's mail pouch, according to Ratcliffe, could be hired to make another one.

The "Chickasaw matriach," Mohataha is Issetibbeha's sister and Ikkemotubbe's mother; "she could write her name . . . a valid signature" and "signed all the conveyances as her son's kingdom passed to the white people, regularizing it in law anyway" (17). As the new courthouse is being built, she sits "in a wagon behind two mules, under a silver-handled Paris parisol held by a female slave child" (25) - and is last seen leading her people "West," as part of the Indian Removal (170).

The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white traders and settlers arrived early in the 18th century. At that time they numbered perhaps 10,000 people. By the early 1830s, when they were 'removed' across the Mississippi River, that number had been reduced to less than 3,000 - many of whom had been assimilated from other tribes, and from mixed marriages with white men and black slaves.

This man, "one of the Holston slaves - the cook's husband, the waiter-groom-hostler" (14), noisily serves Holston's demands.

Ikkemotubbe is the nephew of the older chief, Issetibbeha, and the son of Issetibbeha's sister, Mohataha. He is "the last ruling Chickasaw chief" in the Jefferson territory (169). Ikkemotubbe is one of the most complex and unique of Faulkner's Chickasaw characters. Though he is not prominent in Requiem, he is noted for trading Compson a square mile of valuable Yoknapatawpha County land for Compson's race horse (13).

Ratcliffe, the post trader, is the first Yoknapatawpha member of a family that would eventually produce V.K. Ratliff, a major character in the fictions, especially the Snopes trilogy. Over the generations between them the family name loses two letters; The Town explains: his descendants "forgot how to spell it Ratcliffe and just spelled it like it sounds" - i.e. Ratliff (338). In Requiem Ratcliffe cooperates with Peabody and Compson to bring about the naming of Jefferson. Ratcliffe suggests that the lost lock be charged to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.