The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

One of the boys in town who, "on a dare," joins the unnamed narrator when he was fifteen to spend a night on the Indian mound (66). During and afterwards, they do not speak about their experience, apparently awed by it; the narrator says even though they were children, "yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were - or should have been - beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear" (66).

Friends of the unnamed narrator who associate the Indian mound with "secret and violent blood" and a "savage and sudden destruction" (65). As descendants of "literate, town-bred people," their feelings about the "profoundly and darkly enigmatic mound" stem from their romantic ideas about Indians gotten from the "secret dime novels which we passed among ourselves" (65). One of the boys joins the narrator for a night atop the mound.

The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white settlers arrived. In this story Faulkner imagines that a "remnant" of the tribe remains in Yoknapatawpha in the 1930s, living together "under Government protection" (65), but historically, the entire tribe was "removed" beyond the Mississippi River a hundred years earlier, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

An unspecified number of black men are present in the camp to cook and do other odd jobs during Major de Spain's annual hunting trip. As blacks and as servants, they tend to be ignored or not noticed by the white hunters except when they are sought for some reason, as happens when Major de Spain calls for Old Man Ash to fetch him a drink when Ash has gone to the Indian mound. One of these other black servants appears with the "demijohn and fixings" and reports that Ash has gone "up to'ds de mound" and would be back by daylight (74).

These black men were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash.

This group represents the unnamed African-Americans in the story who are not included in some other group: the blacks at the picnic who were not physically abused by the Provine gang, and the people whom the narrator refers to as "Negroes among us living in economic competition" with the white society; this latter group is identified as having "our family names" - i.e. the same last names as people in the white community (66).

One of the hunters at Major de Spain's camp, seen only in a brief scene in which he is playing poker. His only real significance in the story is to represent the annoyance the rest of the hunting party feels at Luke Provine's bout of hiccups.

John Basket is a Chickasaw who lives in the settlement near the Indian mound, and well-known as moonshiner who makes what Major de Spain describes as "bust-skull whiskey" (75). Basket unwittingly becomes an accomplice in Ash's practical joke against Luke Provine when Ratliff offhandedly suggests Luke visit him to get a cure for his hiccups.

Ike McCaslin is a major character in several of Faulkner's fictions, especially Go Down, Moses. But in this earlier story, he is simply one of the poker-playing hunters at Major de Spain's camp who complains about how the noise from Luke’s hiccups would scare away game, saying, "Do you reckon any varmint in the world is going to walk up to a hay baler?" (69). There is no mention of the family he belongs to, but his dialect ("noways," "durn," 74) suggest he is probably lower class.

Servant of Major de Spain who accompanies the white hunters each fall. Ratliff describes Ash as "Major's nigger, a-helping around camp" (67), but he appears to be the highest ranking of the black servants at the camp, in charge of the kitchen and controlling the "jug" of whisky (68).