The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Ikkemotubbe is the nephew of the older chief, Issetibbeha, and the son of Issetibbeha's sister, Mohataha. Ikkemotubbe is one of the most complex and unique of Faulkner's Chickasaw characters. In "A Name for the City," he is the chief with whom Compson and the other settlers negotiate to acquire their land, and the young Indians who help the whites are referred to as "Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208), but Ikkemotubbe himself never appears.

Issetibbeha is first mentioned as "old Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw King" (200). He is the chief of the tribe that lived in Yoknapatawpha when the first white pioneers arrive, and becomes a "friend" of one of them, Doctor Habersham (202). He has died, however, by the time the main events of the story take place. He is brother to Mohataha and uncle to his successor, Ikkemotubbe.

Originally famous as a frontier military leader, Andrew Jackson became President of the United States in 1829 - where he was best-known for his advocacy of the interests of the 'common man' and his policy of 'removing' the nation's Indian tribes across the Mississippi.

According to Uncle Gavin, this child provides useful and necessary assistance to the magnificent Greek poet, Homer.

Homer is the classic Greek epic poet to whom The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed. His blindness is part of his mythic status. To Gavin Stevens, Homer is proof of what mankind can achieve: despite his disability, he "charted the ultimate frontiers of passion and defeat and glory and ambition and courage and hope and fear" (200).

This aviator, invented by Gavin Stevens, aspires to be the latest individual to set a new speed record for traveling around the world. Stevens gives him elementary emotions and speech, suggesting that Stevens lacks respect for such an individual.

Described as a "middle-aging country lawyer" by his nephew, the narrator, "Uncle Gavin" provides a kind of frame for the story of Jefferson before the city had a name: "Uncle Gavin . . . used to tell me the old tales about Jefferson and the county . . . as though he himself had been there a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago" (200). Gavin Stevens makes his first appearance in the 1931 short story "Hair" and by the 1940s and 50s becomes one of the most important and prevalent characters in Faulkner's fiction.

The narrator's Uncle, Gavin Stevens, begins this story with by referring to the "world travelers" who made history by circumnavigating the globe, from the first ones, who did it in "three years" (he is referring to Magellan's voyage in a sailing ship, 1519-1522), to the ones who did it in "ninety hours" (he is referring to the crew of the US Air Force B-50 bomber who made the trip in 1949); Gavin wrongly adds that "now" - when the story was published, presumably - the feat has been accomplished in "thirty hours" (200).

Although the narrator of the story never identifies himself, when he refers to "Uncle Gavin" in the first sentence readers of other Yoknapatawpha fictions will recognize him as Charles (Chick) Mallison, the son of Gavin Stevens' twin sister Margaret. Faulkner first created him to narrate the story "Monk" (1937), first named him in "Tomorrow" (1940), and came back to him frequently in the last two decades of his career.