Doom

Doom was born "a subchief, a Mingo," one of three children from his mother, the sister of the tribe's chief (317). His birth name does not appear in this story. He is distinguished by the ambition that leads him as a young man to travel to New Orleans, where he appears as a "squat man with a bold, inscrutable, underbred face" (318). It is while living in the city that he acquires the name by which the story constantly refers to him: a Frenchman he meets there calls him "du homme," which turns into "Doom" (318). Also in New Orleans Doom impregnates the "daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family" (318). He returns to his tribe, and by the time this woman, "big with child," joins him there (318), Doom has actually become "the Man," the title by which the Indians refer to their chief, after his uncle (the reigning chief) and the cousin (the next in the paternal line of succession) both suddenly die. Doom himself dies nineteen years after his son is born. Under both his sobriquet and the name he was born with - "Doom" and "Ikkemotubbe" - this character appears often in the fictions. In his next Indian story, "A Justice" (1931), Faulkner describes the violent means by which Doom promoted himself into "the Man."