The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The most ancient of the named Chickasaw chieftains, he is brother to Mohataha and uncle to his successor, Ikkemotubbe.

There are several specific references to the "ladies" of a more recent Jefferson. A hundred years after the naming of Jefferson, two ladies clubs argue over whether "to change the name back to Habersham" (7). And it is only "a few irreconciliable old ladies" - in other words, ladies who have not reconciled themselves to the South's defeat in the Civil War - who refuse to forget the fact that during the war "a United States military force" burned the town Square (37).

The slaves brought into the settlement by Louis Grenier are the first slaves to come "into the country" (6). Two appear in the narrative, and have their own entries in the database: "a slave coachman and footman" (27).

Grenier was a "Huguenot younger son who brought the first slaves into the country and was granted the first big land patent and so became the first cotton planter" (6-7). Grenier first appears by name in a Faulkner narrative in "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939), but plays an even larger role in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as the "Old Frenchman" after whom Frenchman's Bend is named.

Dr. Habersham, one of Yoknapatawpha County's three original pioneers and settlers, comes to the Mississippi settlement "riding horseback across Tennessee from the Cumberland Gap" (6). The Habersham name continues in Yoknapatawpha well into the 20th century, and local descendants of his appear in two other novels.

Holston was an early pioneer and settler in the community. First a servant to Dr. Habersham, he eventually becomes the innkeeper of the settlement. As the original owner of the mammoth lock, he insists on its return after the escape of the bandits. His name survives in 20th century Jefferson in the Holston House.

This person was sent "to fetch the ancient Carolina lock from the latest Nashville mail-pouch" (6).

Among the various kinds of people confined in the original jail are "runaway slaves" (6). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. Although the novel mentions these men several more times, in connection with the kinds of people who were kept in "The Jail," it does not provide any other details about them.

These men are the "amateur" criminals who have been held in the settlement's jail, and who were easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (6).

One of the group of outlaws who are locked (briefly) in the settlement's jail, this bandit is the one who may have claimed that the sergeant who commanded the militia that took them prisoner was "a former follower of his, the bandit's, trade" (5).