After whites moved into the Mississippi frontier, several Indian tribes began to own slaves too; Faulkner had already described this in his other tales about the early life of Yoknapatawpha: "Red Leaves" (1930) and "A Justice" (1931). All we know about the "Negro slaves" who belong to Mohataha is that, along with her descendants and subjects, they purchase items from the settlement's Indian agency turned general store (211).
The enslaved wife of the "waiter-groom-hostler" at Holston's tavern is the establishment's cook (208); although a good bit of the story takes place in the tavern's kitchen, she herself is never seen.
At the time the story takes place, the "man named Compson" has already arrived in Yoknapatawpha and "swapped" his race horse to Ikkemotubbe "for a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in the future town of Jefferson" (206).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2018-10-08 11:22
The mail rider's mother back in Virginia "never had any schooling" (214). When her son was born, she gave him the name of another Virginian, "Thomas Jefferson," hoping that he might somehow benefit from the purely verbal connection.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2018-10-08 11:19
Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence and America's third President, was a man of many interests, talents, and achievements. He became the indirect source of the name that is chosen for the city because a mother named her son Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, hoping to bring her boy "luck" (214) - which might better be understood as 'respect.'
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2018-10-08 11:15
"We already got a church - that's Whitfield's cabin," Peabody tells Pettigrew (213). Although he does not appear directly in this story, Whitfield is probably not a full-time preacher, but a settler who holds lay services in his cabin. He is presumably an ancestor of the "Reverend Whitfield" who is an important character in As I Lay Dying and also appears in several other fictions.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Mon, 2018-10-08 11:13
The "Chickasaw matriach," Mohataha, is Issetibbeha's sister and Ikkemotubbe's mother; she "signed all the conveyances as her son's kingdom passed to the white people, regularizing it in law anyway" (210). Ratcliffe proposes that she be charged with the loss of the giant lock, but Pettigrew rejects this idea. (Faulkner's Mohataha draws on a real Chickasaw leader named Hota, who similarly signed land conveyances for much of the property in Oxford, Mississippi.)
